The exchequer transcript was three yards of heavy rag paper stitched together with waxed green shoemaker’s thread. It was rolled around a broom handle of peeled ash and kept inside a tin metal tube that smelled of lamp-wax and dry mice.
Hester Quill unrolled the paper across the two folding frame stands they had set up inside the baggage wagon. She held the top edge flat with an iron weight shaped like an anvil. Olla, their young apprentice, anchored the bottom edge with a heavy brass inkstand. Outside, the autumn sleet drummed against the greased duck canvas like gravel thrown against a barn wall. The wind forced its way through the seam of the wagon cover, stirring the loose corners of the thick parchment and carrying the sharp, bitter smell of wet coal smoke from the peat fire bowls burning in the sod camp below.
“The Senate sat on the ninth of September in Year 021,” Hester said. He ran her bone paper knife down the tight columns of double-entry ledger script. “The southern tribes had crossed the dry wash of the Silt River. The capital was panicked. Wheat prices on the High Exchange doubled in forty-eight hours. The Senate suspended the ordinary audit requirements and voted fifty thousand crowns in silver coin for the immediate relief and fortification of the Iron Line.”
