With the speaking tube mortared into the wall and Captain Dorn gone down the hill, Noll Vey stepped into the center of the twenty-four empty pine chairs to rehearse his own testimony.
He had four sheets of foolscap in his grey stone hands, written out by Cale at midnight from Noll’s dictation. Hesta Quill sat alone in the high-backed oak armchair on the southern curve of the circle, her patched travelling cloak wrapped around her knees, her battered felt hat with its single dyed pheasant feather tilted over one brow, and her brass-ferruled walking stick planted between her boots.
Tessa Dene leaned against the mason’s barrel by the wall, paring a splinter from her thumb with the corner of her bread knife, while Prit and Cale sat at the clerk’s table with their ink and chalk ready.
“Opening Statement of the Host,” Noll announced, lifting his chin so the grey light from the high arrow slits caught the crooked bridge of his carved stone nose—a detail Tessa had chiseled there on purpose because, as she had said at the time, giving Noll Vey a straight nose would have been an actionable fraud on its own.
He let two seconds of silence gather in the hall, the way he used to do in the assembly rooms at Greyford before pulling the velvet cloth off the glass casket. Then he began to speak.
