The headquarters of the Delta Navigation Trade ring at Mile Nine occupied an old Norman watchtower perched on the high granite bluff overlooking the river-mouth marshes. Inside the vaulted basement, the air smelled of stale beer, damp river moss, and wood ash from the great hearth where the Trade ring’s clerks had hastily tried to burn up their correspondence before the arrival of the court’s court guards.
Tomas Reed knelt before the wide stone fireplace, sifting through the warm gray ashes with a small iron hearth rake. Beside him, Hester Quill was kneeling on a sheepskin pelt. Her small brass measured tongs measuring the depth of the lock ward on a forged iron chest that had been dragged out from beneath the floorboards. She blew a cloud of soot from a blackened thick parchment fragment, her keen eyes scanning the faint traces of dark oak-ink.
“Master Garrow kept two sets of books,” Hester said without looking up, her quill scratching a preliminary note into her field log. “The public book, which he submitted annually to the country tax commissioners, showed a nonstop deficit, claiming the dredge scows cost forty crowns a month to maintain. But the true ledger—the leather folio bound in pigskin—was hidden behind the bread oven in the lower kitchen.”
