At half past eight on the twenty-fifth morning, Pella Rook and Tavi walked down the rain-slick cobbles of Fish Street to Number 19. There, the rhythmic clack of heavy treadle looms and the hiss of damped pressing irons echoed from Master Tailor Dima Fen’s second-story loft. Half the neighbors along the lane had heard by dawn that Proctor Vane’s wardens had marched away from Sister Merrow’s alley the last evening carrying the unbolted bronze segments of the Courtesy Arch on two hand-barrows. Several tenement renters looked out from their doorways with anxious faces, half-expecting to see the workshop crew packing up in defeat.
Instead, when Pella climbed the narrow deal stairs into Dima Fen’s cutting room, she found forty-six-year-old Dima standing at his twelve-foot frame stand table in his shirt-sleeves with his silver-threaded beard tucked neatly into his waistcoat buttonhole and four local journeyman seamstresses working briskly along both sides of a twenty-foot canvas high-pressure sleeve.
Pinned flat beside Dima’s heavy steel shears lay the oilskin-bound fine-tuning notebook that sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye had written out in her neat, copperplate Yorkshire hand before the arch was seized—complete with thread-count tables, forty-five-degree bias angles, and marginal sketches of the offering relief seam.
