Hesper Quill wrote her dispatch by lamplight at the camp table, because she had found that the Bench’s letters read best when they were written in the same light they were going to be read in, and the Bench’s clerks, she had long ago decided, did most of their reading after dark.
The tent was salt-grey canvas, pegged at each corner to the causeway’s stones, and it smelled of wet wool and the sharp oil the Bench’s clerks used on their pens. There were two chairs and a folding table and a brass lamp that had been polished so often it had worn a bright ring in the lamp’s own base. On the table lay the Writ’s second copy, a sheet of the Charter’s text, and the Chancery’s copy of the Register’s satchel, which her clerk had carried back up the causeway that morning and which she had not yet had the leisure to open. She had kept the satchel. The strap was a good one. It was the kind a magistrate might give to a clerk who had carried something heavy and important for her a long way, and she had never quite decided whether she was pleased with it.
