The damp stone archway of the cellar stairs was five feet eleven inches high, carved from single blocks of coarse gray gritstone that had been dressed with a flat chisel before the conquest.
Lady Signe Lorr stood beneath the central keystone, her boots spaced precisely ten inches apart on the first step. She held her ivory-headed judicial cane resting firmly against the flagstone, its iron-shod tip catching the yellow flicker of the tallow candle. Her left hand rested flat against the stone jamb, feeling the slow, rhythmic tremor of the foundation flumes beneath the mortar. By the ancient statutes of the High Assize, a legal witness to a sovereign transfer was required to keep her body in the plane of the threshold; if she stepped into the chamber, she became a party to the covenant; if she retreated into the stairwell, the view was broken and the testimony died.
Beside her, Sister Oda stood with a heavy calfskin liturgical volume balanced across her forearms. The book was bound in split pigskin and clasped with tarnished latten catches, its pages filled with the Latin registers of the Hospice of St. Jude going back three lifetimes.
“The hour is struck,” Oda whispered, her voice low and dry. “The ninth bell has ceased in the tower. The watch has changed on the South Bridge.”
