The study above the bookbinder’s shop on Parchment Lane smelled of dried animal glue, bitter dark oak-ink, and the dry, powdery dust of century-old court records.
Hester Quill sat behind an expansive oak table that groaned under the weight of nine folio volumes bound in cracked sheepskin. A single brass oil lamp with a green glass shade hung from the ceiling beam. It cast a circle of sharp, amber light across her workspace. She wore her dual-lens wire glasses, the outer backup glass flipped down over her right eye to magnify the tiny clerk notations penned into the margins of the town tax rolls.
Beside her, Nessa Vale had unrolled a three-foot land-mapper’s plan of the South Foundry District, weighting the corners with brass lead-plummets. Nessa leaned over the drafting table, her brass sound horn resting against her collar, her calloused thumb tracing the property boundary lines where the canal met the smelting yards.
“Look at the towpath easement, Tomas,” Nessa said, her voice clipped and precise. “Under the original canal charter of Year 008, the public maintains a sixteen-foot right-of-way along both margins of the Black Sluice for barge haulage. But the Smelters’ Cartel took over the ironworks site. Then, they erected a ten-foot wooden wall of corrugated iron right down to the low-water timber piles. They stole sixty rods of public haul-way to build their private scrap bins. The city land-mapper never logged a fine ticket.”
