The oilcloth bundle was cold, stiff with old mutton grease, and smelled faintly of dried lavender and cellars that had never seen noon.
Brann set it down on his cobbler’s bench, between an iron lap-anvil and a saucer of black dye. With trembling fingers, he untied the leather thongs. The oiled linen had hardened into stiff folds that cracked like birch bark as he peeled them back. He showed a thick, folio-sized volume bound in heavy calfskin that had turned the color of dark tea.
Its corners were protected with hammered brass caps. Across the spine, deep-stamped letters remained clear beneath a film of grey mold:
PARISH OF FEN HOLLOW · FIRE & RESCUE ROLL · 440–450 A.D.
Tucked into the back board of the binding was a flat canvas envelope, five inches square. It was tied with red flax string and sealed with an official lead wafer stamped with the town water-gate emblem.
“What’s the envelope?” Tomas asked, leaning over the bench.
Brann wiped his nose with his sleeve. “The back-wages for the parish fire crew. Three pounds, fourteen shillings in copper half-silver coins and silver bits. Collected from the village rate-payers during the autumn before the breach. The watch was supposed to distribute it on the fourteenth of Autumn. But the water came on the tenth. I kept it with the book. I never spent a penny of it, Tomas. Not even when my girl died of the croup in fifty-two and I had to bury her in a borrowed sheet.”
Tomas didn’t touch the envelope. “The claim covers the register, Brann. The wage packet has no quest plate. It remains private property in your custody.”
“Take it with the book,” Brann said, pushing the envelope into Tomas’s hands. “If the court guards search this shack after you leave, they’ll call it stolen town coin and hang me from the river crane. Take it to Ada. Let her pay whatever kin are left in the fens.”
Tomas looked at the lead seal on the envelope. He pulled his leather daybook from his coat, opened to a clean page, and wrote:
Received from Brann, former Watch Clerk: One canvas packet containing parish fire wages, seal intact. Held in private trust for delivery to Ada Fen, Keeper of Fen Hollow.
He signed his name, had Brann make his mark beneath it. Then he placed the receipt in the cobbler’s tin tea box on the shelf.
“A record of trust,” Tomas said. “If Marr comes with court guards, show him the slip. You’re not holding stolen coin. You have entrusted it to a bonded carrier under lawful transit.”
Brann looked at the paper, his jaw working silently. “You think of everything like a clerk, Tomas.”
“My father taught me that an honest man without a receipt is just a thief who hasn’t been caught yet,” Tomas said.
He carefully opened the calfskin volume. The paper inside was heavy rag thick parchment, thick and porous, with faint level ruling in pale red chalk. On the third page, under the heading Lower Weir Hamlet: Permanent Inhabitants, lay seventy-two names written in iron dark oak-ink that had turned the color of dried cedar wood.
Near the bottom of the page, line forty-four:
Lysa Brann, Weaver. Cottage 14, River Bank. 2 Rooms, Stone Footings, Sound Straw roof.
Beside her name was a tick-mark made with a split reed pen, and in the margin, written in the cramped, hurried script of a town checker:
Cleared & Evacuated. 8:00 AM, 10th of Autumn, 442 A.D.
Tomas frowned. He pulled the magnifying glass from his pocket—the one he had bought from Master Kessel—and examined the timestamp.
8:00 AM.
“Brann,” Tomas said quietly. “What time did the bells ring in Bellwether on the flood morning?”
“Noon,” Brann answered without pause. “Twelve o’clock. The Great Bell in the High Tower rang sixty times. The courier rode down the King’s Road at one, shouting that the northern gates had failed and the lower basin had two hours to move their cattle.”
“Then why does this register say your wife’s house was cleared at eight in the morning?”
Brann leaned over the thick parchment, his glasses sliding down his nose. He squinted at the faded ink, his breath catching in his throat.
“Eight in the morning...” he muttered. “At eight in the morning, Lysa was putting bread in the oven. I was at the West Gate station checking hay wagons. There was no water at eight in the morning. The river was three feet below the stone weir.”
“Someone marked the houses cleared four hours before the warning bells were rung,” Tomas said. His voice dropped into a cold, flat register. “They were writing the escape off before the water ever reached the levee.”
Tomas looked at the next page. It contained twenty-eight more names from the Willow Weir parish, each marked with the same cold, eight-o’clock notation. The handwriting was matching: small, rigid, sloping sharply to the right, carried out with an unbending steel pen. There was no pause in the strokes, no ink blotches, no evidence of haste. It had been written at a dry desk by a man who was completing an office task before breakfast.
A shadow fell across the open doorway.
Tomas closed the calfskin volume with a soft, dull thud. His hand dropped to his ash staff resting against the bench.
Nessa Vale stood on the threshold, her green land-mapper’s cloak dark with rain and her brass sound horn held in her right hand. Her eyes moved swiftly across the small shop, noting the cracked flat stone slab, the gravel pit, and the open book on the table.
“Tomas,” she said, her voice crisp and slightly raised. “We have company in the alley.”
Tomas rose from his stool. “Court guards?”
“Two runners from the guild registrar’s office,” Nessa said, pointing her thumb over her shoulder. “They’re standing at the mouth of Awl Court, pretending to buy hot pies from the baker’s boy. One of them has a brass tally plate in his belt. They’ve been watching the entrance for ten minutes.”
Tomas picked up the calfskin fire register, wrapped it securely in its greased oilcloth. Then he slid it into his hemp haul-pack. He tucked the canvas wage packet into his inner breast pocket, next to his Last Claim registration thick parchment.
“Can we reach the river slip through the back?” Tomas asked.
Brann nodded, stepping to the rear wall of the lean-to. He pushed aside a hanging bundle of dried cattle bladders. He showed a low timber hatch that opened onto a narrow under-road drain running between the two tanneries. The under-road drain was eighteen inches wide, choked with dark, foul-smelling tannery runoff that flowed toward the Silt Ditch.
“Follow the trough,” Brann whispered, handing Tomas an iron pry-bar. “It comes out behind Master Garrow’s stable. The water is knee-deep, but the walls are six feet high. The runners won’t see your hats from the street.”
Tomas looked at the old cobbler. “Come with us, Brann.”
Brann shook his head. A strange, quiet peace had settled over his lined face, smoothing the bitter creases around his mouth.
“I have shoes to mend, Tomas,” the old man said softly. “The butcher’s boy needs his heels. I’ve lived in this ditch too long to run through a sewer. But take the book. Take it to Ada. Tell her... Tell her Brann kept his wife’s house on the page.”
Tomas took the old man’s hand. His grip was rough, stiff with leather dye, but the pressure was firm and warm.
“Her name will stay on the page, Brann,” Tomas said.
He turned to the hatch, stepped through into the cold, stinking sludge of the tannery under-road drain. Then he motioned for Nessa to follow.
As they moved down the under-road drain, the dark stone walls pressed close. Water splashed against Tomas’s leather knee-guards, cold and greasy. Ahead, Nessa used her iron-shod levelling rod to test the footing, avoiding the jagged iron grates where the tanners emptied their lime vats.
“Three hundred paces to the river slip,” Nessa said, her voice low under the brick arch. “Keep your head down. If the runners hear us, they have whistles.”
Tomas kept his left hand pressed against his haul-pack. He felt the hard box-shaped shape of the calfskin volume. Thirty years beneath a cobbler’s flat stone slab had not ruined the thick parchment. The ink was clear, the names were sharp, and the lead seal on the wage packet was untampered.
“Brann took a great risk,” Tomas murmured.
“Brann loved his wife,” Nessa said without turning around. “People in the high ward think love is a song sung by a minstrel in a velvet doublet. In the low ward, love is keeping a dead woman’s house on a tax roll so the city can’t pretend she never baked bread.”
They reached the iron grating behind Garrow’s livery stable. Tomas used the iron pry-bar Brann had given him, levering the rusted pins until the grate swung outward with a dull, wet groan. They climbed out into the rain-soaked gravel of the stable yard, ducking behind a row of hay wains while two wagon drivers argued over a broken axle.
Two minutes later, they were on the river path. They walked south beneath the dripping willows toward the ferry landing.