Dima Fen’s tailor shop on the corner of Weaver Street and Fish Street smelled of raw wool-grease, boiled beeswax, and damp reed fiber. For thirty years, Dima had cut heavy wool cloaks for dock clerks and stiff leather jerkins for river fishermen, his curved shears clicking through bolt after bolt of coarse domestic cloth with the cynical indifference of a man who believed fashion was an invention of the tax office.
Today, the large cutting table in the center of his shop was cleared of wool. Laid out across the dark elm planks were three finished coats made from triple-layered river-reed canvas, their seams taped with boiled beeswax and their shoulders heavy with offset gussets cut to Jo Saye’s master pattern.
On the small stove in the corner of the shop, a tin kettle of boiled tea gave off a steady hiss of steam, while on the window doorstep, Sister Merrow’s sourdough crust from yesterday’s delivery lay beside Dima’s heavy brass tailoring shears. Outside, the rain drummed steadily against the wet stonework of the Weaver Street arcade.
Three men stood before Dima’s full-length looking glass. The only glass mirror in the Lower Wards that hadn’t been cracked by harbor settling. They were town sewer flushers from the Board of Works. Heavy, thick-shouldered men with pale, scarred faces and hands that had been scalded by steam leaks in the deep channels since their boyhood.
