The Guildhall lower vestry smelled of beeswax candles, polished dark wood. The faint, bitter tang of dried lavender scattered across the Turkish carpets to mask the damp river draft. Around the long walnut table sat six senior aldermen of the Wool Merchants’ Guild. Their beaver-fur mantles pulled was tight, their expressions sour and defensive.
Across the table stood Mira Os and Pella Rook. Mira wore her best black wool widow’s gown, neatly mended at the cuffs, her gray hair pinned under a clean linen cap. She didn’t bow, and she didn’t curtsy. She set her hands flat on the polished table, looking directly into the eyes of Master Vane.
‘Master Vane,’ Mira said, her voice clear, sharp, and uncompromising. ‘Your guild has four hundred bales of raw Leicester wool stored in the lower Roman vaults of the maltings. By three o’clock tomorrow afternoon, Candidate Rook is opening the flood grates into those cellars. If your wool is still on the floor, your four hundred bales will be forty tons of sodden, rotting mud.’
Alderman Grote, a portly cloth merchant with three gold rings on his fingers, slammed his fist onto the table. ‘This is an outrage! We pay thirty silver coins a year to the city treasury for secure dry storage! By what power does an apprentice girl and a tenement widow order the dead-letter of forty thousand silver coins of valuable cargo?’
