While the crews on the overhead frame were wrestling with drift timber, a wild message arrived at the museum gallery from the lower tanneries on the Salt Slipway. Master Malcom, a stubborn old leather-currier who had worked the riverside vats for fifty years, had barred his oak doors from the inside and was refusing to leave his workshop, despite two feet of warm, rotten-egg slow leak rising through his floor grates.
“He says looters will steal his cured calf hides the moment his back is turned,” Kel Dorr reported breathlessly. He wiped the freezing sleet from his forehead. “He’s sitting on his tanning table with a four-pound skiving knife in his hand, shouting that he’d rather drown in his own tannin than let the scavengers take forty years of work.”
Sister Merrow didn’t send armed sergeants with iron pry-bars. She took her heavy ash cane, picked up her leather ledger, and walked straight down Fish Street into the flooded tannery yard, her nurse’s bonnet pulled tight beneath her chin. She pounded three times on Malcom’s oak shutter with the iron metal ring of her cane. “Open this door, Malcom! It’s Sister Merrow. I don’t have twenty minutes to listen to an old badger grumble through a keyhole!”
