Len untied the rawhide lanyard from his belt. He lifted the tarred parcel onto the pine butcher’s table.
Under the harsh green glare of the copper lantern, the bundle looked like a lump of scrap coal from an engine tender. But inside that wrapping of tarred sailcloth and oiled wool lay four ounces of stamped ordnance bronze that had transformed from an old courier’s keepsake into a sound bright light of execution.
He took his skinning knife from his tool roll. He used the sharp tip of the blade to slit the waxed hemp twine that bound the outer canvas. Layer by layer, he peeled back the tarred fabric, his movements slow, careful, and agonizingly quiet. The smell of sheep grease and rancid sheep fat rose from the boiled fleece beneath, thick and heavy in the warm cellar air.
Len looked down at the exposed bronze. Beneath the stamped serial letters of his father’s bond, the metal bore the tiny, tiny tool marks of the original lathe chaser who had faced the rim twenty-two years ago in the Morren’s Ford foundry.
He remembered the morning his father had given him the bell to polish for the first time. Len had been twelve years old, an apprentice courier who had just received his first pair of nailed road boots. Deren had sat on the stable mounting block. He held the bell between his knees. Meanwhile, he scraped dried road mud from the mounting pin with a pocketknife.
