Elin Hale stood in the center of the hollow square, her boots planted on the gray stone where the mortar was worn smooth by two centuries of guild elections. She did not look at Sir Cael’s blued plate, nor at the iron sledgehammer Marris Gault had slammed into the oak board. Men loved the theater of steel and heavy timber; they loved the sound of a gavel striking oak, because it sounded like an order given on a parade ground.
She looked past the tables, past the brazier, straight up to the gallery benches beneath the rafters where fifty women sat with woolen shawls drawn tight across their chests.
Among them sat Widow Clara Moss, her silver hair escaping a black linen hood, her gnarled, arthritic fingers clamped around the crook of a polished hickory cane. Beside her sat Briony Kell, the cartwright’s sister, her leather apron dusted with cedar shavings, her late brother Steffan’s stitching awl tucked into the breast loop of her bodice like an iron brooch. And behind them sat forty mothers from the weavers’ lanes, their aprons still smelling of sour milk, wood ash, and the coarse carbolic soap they used to scour floorboards before the children woke.
