Before Tessa Dene was ten years old, she had learned that you never listened to a company bailiff’s mouth when he came down the row to explain why the pit wages were short.
A bailiff’s mouth was paid by the week to sound sorry. When her father, Edren, came up the main shaft of the Mere silver-and-iron mine with black stone-dust in his spit and three tubs of ore on his tally board, the weigh-clerk at the pithead would shake his head like a parson at a funeral, sigh about wet shale in the lower drift, and dock the tub weight by a quarter while asking warmly after Tessa’s mother’s rheumatism. If you watched the clerk’s face, you went home thinking the mountain itself had robbed you and the company was weeping on your behalf.
If you watched the clerk’s hands, you saw where his thumb held the brass counter-weight against the scale beam before the tub even settled on the hook.
Standing behind the scrubbed pine serving board beside Hobb’s steaming copper kettle, Tessa wiped an earthenware bowl dry with a coarse linen clout and kept her eyes on the hands at the end of the nearest bench.
To Tessa’s eyes, Lord Auditor Orin Vane had the cleanest fingernails of any man who had ridden fourteen miles through mountain slush.
