Mott unrolled the oilcloth on the Gatehouse counting-room table one fold at a time, the way she had been taught to open a bale of contested cloth. A factor never shook a document out of its wrapping. A shake would fold the corners under and the corners were where the lies always hid. She smoothed each crease flat with the side of her gloved hand, and when the last fold lay open she took her glove off and laid her bare palm on the cloth beside the thing it had wrapped.
It was a split stick of pale wood, two spans long. The bark had been shaved off one face and the flat was scored with notches, most of them clean and a few of them doubled, as if the cutter had been interrupted and had gone back to finish. At one end the stick had been bound with a knot of thin cord, and under the knot a strip of paper had been tied round the wood, very old, gone soft at its edges like a wet leaf, with writing on it in a brown ink that had dried to a dark clean line.
“The Foundation Paper,” said Mott.
