At a quarter past three on Tuesday afternoon, the cast-iron radiator beneath the front display window of Threadbare Alterations began its customary clanking. It was a rhythmic, iron-on-iron thump that Jo Saye had timed to within forty seconds every winter for nineteen years. Three sharp raps as the steam rose from the basement boiler. It was followed by a long, wet hiss as the air vent spit a drop of rusty water drops onto the linoleum floor.
Jo set her heavy dressmaking shears onto the cutting mat, placing them blade-down with the points facing the wall.
Her hands were tired. The base of her right thumb was swollen from cutting three yards of heavy Melton wool for an overcoat relining, the dull ache of osteoarthritis throbbing under the knuckle like a deep toothache. She reached into her cardigan pocket, pulled out a small tub of arnica balm. Then she rubbed a greasy dab into the joint with slow, circular strokes.
Upstairs, the floorboards creaked twice. Martin walked his measured twenty paces from the bedroom to the small back parlour. His second hip operation in August had left him with a stiff left leg. But he kept to his daily exercise chart pinned to the pantry door: ten minutes of walking, five minutes of ankle rotations, three cups of hot water with lemon.
Jo picked up her heavy clay mug of boiled tea from the pressing table, blew away the steam. Then it sat down on her high wooden stool.
Behind her, in the narrow nook between the bolt racks of raw, unwhitened calico and a stack of customer suit-bags, the air developed a distinct, cold draft.
It smelled of river mud, crushed pipe lime, and wet stonework.
Jo didn’t jump. At sixty-one, having raised two daughters, altered formal evening gowns for the mayor’s wife, and replaced six hundred broken nylon zips on school trousers, she was entirely disinclined to dramatic reactions. If a nook behind her scrap bins chose to develop a sound sky-slit, it had better not spill water on her bias binding.
The pale slate-blue glyph hovered in the cool air above the leftover piece bin, silent, sharp-edged, and fully level with the top shelf:
Jo took a slow sip of her tea, swallowed, and set the mug on a coaster.
“The clock is running,” she said toward the blue letters, her voice dry, level, and carrying the flat vowels of the West Riding. “Whoever is on the other end of that chimney, you have fourteen minutes and forty seconds before I pick my chalk up again.”
From the depths of the nook came a faint scraping sound—the sound of an iron stool dragging across wet flat stone slabs.
“Mistress Saye?”
The voice was young, feminine, but worn thin by cold and lack of sleep. It was the same girl Ada Morland had mentioned over the telephone on Sunday evening: Pella Rook, the ferryman’s daughter from the lower river wards.
“Mrs. Saye will do,” Jo said, smoothing the lapel of her gray cardigan. “Or Jo, if you’re short on breath. Ada told me you were having trouble with your pipes, but I’m not a plumber. My trade is needle, shears, and fit. What are you asking about?”
“Work coats,” the voice answered, coming through with remarkable clarity, with the distant, rhythmic thrum of river water pounding against timber wooden support posts. “The Lowbank harbor armorers make them for the apprentice wagon drivers and the water gate crews. My friend Eren Tal has been wearing his father’s old coat for three seasons. His shoulders are seized up like rusted hinges.”
Jo leaned back on her stool, resting her elbows on the cutting board. Her eyes drifted to a wooden tailor’s dummy standing beside her Singer heavy-duty machine.
“Describe the coat,” Jo said. “Don’t tell me what color it’s. Tell me what it’s made of and where the seams run.”
“Boiled cowhide,” Pella said. “The guild masters take tiny hide, boil it in animal fat and pine resin until it sets stiff as an oak board, and rivet the shoulder plates together with copper rivets. The breast is double-lapped to stop flying stone chips from the stonework saws. The armholes are cut out with a round hollow punch.”
Jo let out a long, quiet breath through her nose.
“Good lord,” she said. “You’re sending men to haul timber in a cast-iron kettle.”
“They say the stiffness protects the ribs if a boom swings,” Pella offered, though her tone suggested she doubted the guild’s wisdom.
“It protects their ribs by ensuring they can’t jump out of the way when the boom comes,” Jo replied tartly. “Listen to me, lass. A body isn’t a gatepost. When a man swings an adze, his shoulder blade doesn’t just rotate—it glides outward along his rib cage by nearly four inches. If you cut a round hole in a piece of tiny boiled leather, you’ve made a circular guillotine.”
Through the arch, the scratch of a quill on rough paper could be heard. The dark bite of dark oak-ink recording every syllable.
“A guillotine?” Pella asked.
“A body clamp,” Jo corrected. “The lower curve of an armhole—what we call the scye—sits right against the armpit. When you raise your elbow to haul a rope, that stiff leather rim presses straight into the axilla. It compresses the upper-arm artery and pinches the forearm nerve against the upper arm bone. That’s why your friend’s arms go numb after twenty minutes. It isn’t muscle fatigue. You’re cutting off the blood and the nerve signal to his fingers. In two years of that, he won’t be able to hold a chisel without his hands shaking.”
The silence on the Lathmere side lasted four seconds. Jo heard the distant drip of cellar water drops.
“How do you fix it?” Pella asked. “If the leather is soft, the river mud rots it in two weeks. If it’s stiff, it lames the wagon drivers.”
Jo reached for a yellow wax grease pencil she kept behind her ear. She pulled a scrap piece of brown pattern paper toward her. Then she drew a quick diagram.
“You don’t make a work garment out of one rigid shell,” Jo said, her tone brisk, skilled. “You separate the load-bearing armor from the joint. The shoulder cap can be stiff if you must stop falling stones. But the underarm scye must never be rigid leather. Never.”
“What goes under the arm, then?”
“A gusset,” Jo said. “A diamond-shaped insert of flexible, multi-layered cloth. But you don’t cut the cloth straight along the warp. You cut it on the bias—forty-five degrees across the grain.”
“The bias?”
“The slanted,” Jo explained, tapping her grease pencil against the paper. “Woven fabric has no give along the warp or the weft. It’s locked tight by the threads crossing at right angles. But if you cut it on the slanted, the threads can shear past one another like a trellis gate. It stretches when the elbow goes up, and it pulls back flat when the arm drops. And you bind the edges with bias-cut tape, not flat leather stitching. Bias tape rolls with the skin instead of cutting into the flesh.”
“We don’t have woolen broadcloth in Lowbank,” Pella said. Her voice dropped into a practical math. “Wool is taxed by the Senate. But the weavers in the lower marshes make cloth from water-reeds. They harvest the green stems, soak them in river salt water, beat them with wooden mallets, and weave them into a four-shaft twill. It’s stiff as sailcloth when it’s dry. But when river spray hits it, the reed fibers swell up and soften.”
Jo tapped her chin with the blunt end of her pencil. Her seamstress’s curiosity, sharpened over fifty years of handling silks, linens, horsehairs, and worsteds, stirred beneath her sensible cardigan.
“Reed twill,” Jo murmured. “Plant fiber with a natural wax sheath. If it swells with moisture, it will self-seal against wind, like an unproofed canvas tent in a thunderstorm.”
“It does,” Pella confirmed. “The boatmen use it for hatch tarpaulins. But the armorers won’t touch it. They say cloth is for women’s petticoats, not working men.”
“The armorers are fools who have never held a needle,” Jo said crisply. “A three-layer reed twill, quilted with linen thread on a two-inch diamond grid and fitted with an underarm bias gusset, will turn a flying splinter just as well as boiled cowhide. It will weigh five pounds instead of thirty. A man who isn’t exhausted by his own coat doesn’t get his hand caught under the cart wheel.”
Above the leftover piece bins, the slate letters shifted, the countdown digits ticking down smoothly: 03m 12s / 15m 00s.
“I have three minutes,” Jo said, looking at the glowing letters. “I’m not taking an unbilled commission, Pella Rook. If I spend my tea breaks drafting patterns for your Lowbank wagon drivers, it has to be on proper trade terms. I don’t work for thanks. Thanks doesn’t pay the gas bill.”
“I understand,” Pella said right away. “Ada told me. We have a locked deposit ledger started with scrap silver. Hal Rook left twelve silver coins in his workshop chest, approved by the Lowbank ferry guild. They’re ninety-two percent pure river silver. When Ada crossed with her gauge, she took a sliver for assay.”
Jo gave a small, approving nod. “Ada is sensible about money. If the silver assays clean with Tamsin Drew on High Street, we can agree on a pattern check rate. But before I draft a pattern for a reed gusset, I need to feel the cloth.”
“Can it pass through?”
“The writing on that board says seven pounds limit,” Jo said, glancing at the slate. “I don’t need seven pounds. I need a piece six inches square. Cut it from the center of the bolt, not the selvage edge. Make sure it hasn’t been treated with pig fat or fish oil. My shop has to smell of lavender, not a Lowbank gutter.”
“I have a scrap from Dima Fen’s cutting bin,” Pella said. “I can wash it in well water and press it flat under a flat stone slab tonight.”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Jo said, standing up from her stool. “Quarter past three, right on my tea break. If you push it through the oval when the clock starts, I’ll test the grain with my thumbs, see how it takes a crease, and tell you if your reed cloth will hold a bias stitch.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Saye.”
“Don’t thank me until the sleeve doesn’t rip,” Jo replied.
She reached for her empty mug and turned back toward the shop counter. Behind her, the slate glyph faded into the cool shadow of the fabric bolts, the countdown clicking to zero with a faint, clean rustle like tissue paper settling in a cardboard box.
The room was still again, save for the steady clank of the cast-iron radiator and the faint rumble of the number forty-two bus climbing the wet hill toward the railway station. Jo picked up her heavy shears, tested the pivot screw with her thumbnail. Then she went back to pinning Mr. Henderson’s overcoat.