“Plot Thirteen, right against the north brick wall of Bessa Karr’s salt-shed,” Jon Hale said into the hush of the taproom, his unmarked right index finger resting on the three-inch gap of blank vellum in the North Quay register, “was the workshop and garret of Master Eamon Cole, cordwainer and bootmaker, aged forty-five.”
Behind the bar, Elin’s breath caught softly in her throat, while out on the floor Master Weaver Joran Finch and Notary Corve Penner stared at the empty parchment as if Jon were reading aloud from a gravestone buried under the sea.
“His shop door was three-plank river oak painted with dark woad-blue pigment mixed in boiled linseed oil,” Jon continued, refusing to let his voice hurry or blur a single trade detail. “That splinter of rotted oak sill on the bar came out of his south door-jamb ten minutes ago. Every autumn when the hides came down from the tanneries, Eamon Cole hung a carved wooden boot-last painted red and gold from an iron bracket above his lintel. He had a crooked left thumb from where a cobbler’s awl slipped when he was an apprentice, and he smelled of pine pitch, neat’s-foot oil, and smoked beech-bark. In the winter months, when coin was scarce on the quay, he paid his beer score at this bar with six pairs of waxed leather boot-laces and two cakes of yellow beeswax.”
