The cellar beneath the shuttered Ferry Museum smelled of wet lime mortar, river rot, and stale animal fat. It was an underground vault carved into the riverbank cut stone sixty paces downstream from the Lowbank ferry landing. There, three ages of town watermen had stacked split oars, tarred hemp rope, and unsafe winch pawls.
Pella Rook pulled her apprentice wool tunic tighter around her shoulders. The bottle-green wool, worn thin at the shoulder blades and patched at both elbows with scrap leather from Eren Tal’s yard, did little to keep out the autumn draft creeping between the river-wharf wooden support posts. The tide was running slack outside. But the stone beneath her cart driver boots stayed cold, sweating dark beads of water drops that ran down the mortar lines into the gravel floor.
She set her tin lamp on the corner of an oak shelving rack. The rack had bowed under the weight of eighty years of uninspected town water ledgers, its uprights stained black by two hundred years of seasonal floods.
“If the registrar knew I had this key,” Pella murmured to the damp darkness, “he would have added a padlock to the eviction writ.”
She used a bone scraper to clean the mold from the leather spine of an oblong register. The binding was stiff sheepskin, rotted along the lower edge where floodwater had underwater the lower shelves fourteen years ago during the Great Flood. Its brass clasps were coated in a dry, pale turquoise crust of copper…
