Weaver’s Row smelled of hot animal fat, stale sheep grease. The sharp, sour tang of fermented urine used to fix indigo vats in the basement dye-trenches. The street was narrow, paved with slick river cobbles that cried black slime between the joints, choked on both sides by three-story timber apartments whose upper jetties leaned inward until their roof edges nearly touched.
Pella Rook pushed open the heavy oak half-door of Dima Fen’s tailor shop, the small brass warning bell above the top door beam giving a flat, tinny clatter that died in the thick air.
Inside, the light was dim, filtered through oiled parchment panes set in heavy lead cames. The workshop was crowded with the dense, oppressive weight of woolen cloth. Bolts of six-ply dark gray river fleece stacked five feet high along the walls, bundles of cured ox-hide tied with tarred hemp, and iron drying racks hung with stiff draymen’s jerkins drying after their second animal fat-soak.
At the long oak cutting table in the center of the room, Master Dima Fen stood with his heavy iron shears in hand, a block of tailor’s pipe lime held between his teeth.
He was forty-six years old. He was built with the thick, rounded shoulders of a man who had spent thirty-five years shearing three-quarter-inch boiled wool. His knuckles were swollen, stained permanently blue-black from dark oak-ink and copperas vat dye. Beneath his greasy leather apron, his wool smock was patched with scraps of red barge-canvas.
“The shop is closed to retail trade, apprentice,” Dima said around the chalk block, not looking up from the dark wool spread before him. “The grain wagon drivers took thirty coats on account last Martinmas and haven’t paid their check. If you’re here for Sister Merrow’s apron scraps, the bin behind the privy is empty.”
“I’m not here for scraps, Master Fen,” Pella said. She stepped up to the end of the cutting table. She pulled the brown butcher paper roll and Jo Saye’s knotted linen twine from beneath her cloak, and laid them flat on the scrubbed oak timber.
Dima’s iron shears stopped with a heavy, grinding snick.
He took the chalk from his mouth, set it on a saucer of whale animal fat. Then he looked down at the brown paper. His heavy brows pulled down in an unbending scowl.
“What’s that rubbish?”
“A pattern drafting,” Pella said. “From a master alterations seamstress.”
“Paper?” Dima’s voice rose in dry, scornful disbelief. He flicked the edge of the brown sheet with a stained thumbnail, making it crackle. “You bring foreign pastry-wrapping into a Lowbank guild shop? What’s this thin muck? Paper is for clerks who don’t know the difference between a warp thread and an alder twig.”
He jabbed the blunt iron point of his shears toward the stacked bolts behind him.
“This is Lowbank cloth, girl. Six-ply sheep wool, boiled in salt water until the fibers felt together tight as an oak plank, then dressed with hot mutton grease and beeswax. It sheds the autumn sleet. It stops a flying splinter from a shattered heavy cart tongue. It keeps the liver warm. Just then, a boatman has to stand at the sweep oar in five hours of freezing river fog. You want to wrap a working cart driver in brown grocer’s wrapping?”
“The paper isn’t the coat, Master Fen,” Pella said. She kept her tone measured and calm, remembering Jo Saye’s instructions. “The paper is the shape.”
“Shape belongs on the marble hill,” Dima snapped. He turned back to his bench and running his shears along a chalked line with a violent, crunching sound. “The College summoners draw circles with gold dust, and look where it gets them—water backing up into the apartments. Down here on the mud, we don’t draw circles. We cut square, we sew double with waxed flax, and we bind the hems with calfskin. Hal Rook knew that forty years ago when he built the ferry piers. He didn’t ask a woman with a roll of butcher paper how to shoe an axle.”
Pella didn’t withdraw the paper. She unrolled it another four inches, using a square lead weight from the scrap bin to hold the curl flat. Jo’s neat red grease pencil diagram of the curved armscye lay exposed under the animal fat lamp.
“Eren Tal dropped his drawknife this morning,” Pella said quietly.
Dima’s shears paused, though he didn’t look up. “Eren is a clumsy wheelwright. He always worked too fast with his adze.”
“His thumb went dead,” Pella continued. “His fourth and fifth fingers turned white and cold as river ice. He couldn’t grip a chisel for half an hour.”
“River palsy,” Dima muttered, leaning his belly against the bench. “The fog gets into the bones of the lower ward. Every man on the wharves takes a turn with the shivers when the spring thaw begins.”
“It isn’t river palsy,” Pella said. “Three apprentices collapsed from heat tiredness at the grain hoist yesterday afternoon. They were wearing your six-ply boiled wool jerkins, Master Fen. Young Burl passed out on the ramp, dropped a two-hundred-pound meal sack, and nearly broke his partner’s shins.”
Dima’s jaw tightened. A dark, angry flush rose from his neck, creeping into his hollow cheeks. “The grain hoist boys work ten hours in an unvented loft. If they take the shivers, they should drink vinegar wash and stay off the cheap tavern beer.”
“They didn’t have the shivers,” Pella said, her voice cutting through his bluster with quiet, unbending power. “They were choking inside twenty pounds of boiled wool and mutton grease. And the draymen aren’t suffering from river palsy. Look at this knotted string.”
She picked up Jo’s waxed linen twine. She held it between her two hands so the single and double knots hung in a clean catenary arc across the cutting table.
“This twine was measured against Eren Tal’s back while he worked,” Pella said. “When he stands with his arms down, his back span is twenty-one inches. When he reaches forward to haul a log or swing an axe, his shoulder blades expand by five full inches. Twenty-six inches across the bone.”
She pointed to the stiff, circular armhole of the unfinished jerkin resting under Dima’s shears.
“Your guild pattern cuts an eighteen-inch armscye, circular as an iron hoop, bound with rigid split ox-hide. When Eren reaches forward, his back demands five extra inches of cloth. Your boiled wool has zero bias give. It can’t stretch. So where does your jacket get those five inches?”
Dima stood motionless, his heavy hand resting on the iron shears.
“It steals them from the armpit,” Pella said. “The lower rim of that leather-bound circle jams upward into his axilla. It crushes the axillary artery. It pinches the forearm nerve flat against the upper arm bone with every blow of his mallet. You aren’t giving the draymen armor, Master Fen. You’re putting them into a leather tourniquet. In three years, every wagon driver on Fish Street will have dead hands.”
The shop fell entirely quiet. From the rear courtyard came the steady, rhythmic drip-drip of water leaking from a copper green rust wash trough, and from the street outside came the heavy, iron-shod rumble of a brewery heavy cart rolling over the wet stonework.
Dima stared at Pella. For a long moment, his chest rose and fell heavily against the leather of his apron, his teeth grinding in defensive pride. A master of forty years didn’t brook correction from a nineteen-year-old girl who had been expelled from the Summoners’ Quadrangle with her tin badge broken.
“The draymen...” Dima began, his voice rough and strained. “The wagon drivers’ guild master came to my counter on Tuesday. He complained that his boys were dropping their trace chains. He said the tavern beer was poisoned with lead salts.”
“The beer is fine,” Pella said. “The coats are strangling them.”
Slowly, almost against his own will, Dima laid the iron shears down on the oak bench. The metal gave a dull, heavy clink.
He reached out with his thick, indigo-stained fingers and picked up Jo’s brown paper diagram. He brought it close to his eyes, squinting at the fine red wax lines in the dim lamp-glow.
His thumb traced the deep, egg-shaped contour of the armscye Jo had drawn—the dramatic inward scoop on the chest side, and the high, shallow curve on the back shoulder.
“This cut...” Dima murmured, his voice losing its harsh edge. He dropped into the gut contemplation of an artisan inspecting unfamiliar joinery. “The scye is oblong. It isn’t round. The front is scooped out nearly three inches deeper than the back.”
“Because the human arm reaches forward to work,” Pella explained, pointing to Jo’s chalk notes. “A man rarely works with his elbows pushed behind his spine. When he reaches forward, the scooped front prevents the cloth from bunching across the chest muscle tendon. Meanwhile, the wide back allowance keeps the shoulder seam from pulling.”
Dima grunted, his thumb moving to the center back of the sketch. “And this line down the spine? This fold?”
“An inverted box pleat,” Pella said. “Hidden beneath an ungreased weather flap. When he stands straight, the pleat lies closed, flat as a board. When he heaves an axe, the pleat opens two and a half inches on each side, giving his back the full five inches of spreading without moving the armpit seam a fraction of an inch.”
Dima stood staring at the brown paper for two full minutes.
His pride was not dead but beneath the pride was the stubborn, incorruptible honesty of a man whose livelihood depended on clothes that actually functioned in the mud. It was too deeply rooted in the forty years he had spent surviving the damp poverty of Lowbank.
He looked up from the drawing, his dark eyes fixing on Pella’s face.
“Who drew this?” he asked, his voice low and gravelly. “The college masters don’t know this kind of drafting. They don’t know what an axilla is. They think a coat is an enchantment you buy with a silver certificate.”
“A master seamstress,” Pella said. “From another district.”
“Does she know what river rain does to thin cloth?” Dima demanded, his defensiveness flaring again like damp kindling. “If I cut this open pleat into six-ply boiled wool, the river mist will soak into the fold, freeze in December, and turn the man’s spine into a bar of ice.”
“She knows wool,” Pella said. “And she wants to know about your native water-reed weave.”
Dima blinked, his scowl returning. “The water-reed? The marsh reed is peasant cloth. It’s what the basket weavers use for potato sacks.”
“She said that if we understand how the reed behaves under steam, we can tailor a jacket that breathes when a man is dry, and seals itself when the wet hits the seams.”
Dima looked from the brown paper to the knotted linen twine lying on his oak counter. He rubbed the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand, a slow, grudging curiosity finally breaking through the heavy shell of his guild vanity.
“Tomorrow morning,” Dima said gruffly, rolling the brown paper up and tucking it into his apron pocket. “I’ll bring a bolt of three-ply green reed-cloth to Sister Merrow’s washroom. If your foreign seamstress thinks she can teach Dima Fen how to stitch a sleeve, she can tell me to my face.”