At seven bells on the eighth morning, Pella Rook and Foreman Eren Tal walked down the wet cobbles to Number 19 Fish Street. There, Master Tailor Dima Fen kept his cutting and pressing shop above a deep limestone cellar.
Through the steamed glass of the ground-floor window, forty-six-year-old Dima Fen stood at his broad deal cutting table in a dark wool waistcoat, his silver-threaded hair brushed back from a sharp, observant forehead and a yellow linen measuring tape draped around his neck.
The shop smelled richly of hot beeswax, damped melton broadcloth under heavy cast-iron goose irons, boiled wool-grease, and the clear bitter stone vapor creeping up the cellar stairwell at the back of the room.
Waiting beside Dima’s pressing board stood two lower-lane neighbors—old Cooper Hobb and Net-Maker Sela—each holding a folded square of stiff academy parchment.
Before looking at the papers, Dima Fen gestured with the points of his ten-inch steel shears toward four pairs of elbow-length protective gauntlets laid out across a clean Pressing cloth.
Two days earlier, after Jo Saye had diagnosed the shoulder-gap in the local military boiler suits and shared her seam shape through the Courtesy Arch, Dima had undertaken to adapt her pattern using Lowbank’s native marsh-reed fibers.
