Dawn on the ninth day arrived over Lowbank as a greasy, sulfur-stained drizzle that turned the soot on the chimney pots into a thin paste of black slurry. The river mud at the mouth of Fish Market Alley smelled of dead ling, rancid cod liver oil. The sour chemical steam that continued to seep through every crack in the street paving. Along the wharf walls, the water level remained eight inches below its normal autumn marks. That left wooden coal lighters tilted awkwardly on the exposed mudbanks.
Pella Rook walked down Fish Market Alley with a wicker basket tucked beneath her arm, sent by Sister Merrow to buy a bag of coarse oatmeal and three salt herrings before the morning trade took the best barrels. Her bottle-green apprentice tunic was stiff with dried river mud, and beneath her woolen fingerless mittens, her knuckles ached from five hours spent in the cellar wooden props the shaking baked-clay water chute. Every breath she drew tasted of sulfur and damp wool.
At the corner where the fish stalls met the lower boat ramp, a dense knot of thirty people was gathered around an itinerant printer’s cart. Master Garrow, a one-eyed broadsheet hawker with an ink-stained leather apron and a voice like a rusted iron hinge, was standing on a salt barrel. He waved a wet, freshly inked woodcut print in each hand.
