The Chamber of Petitions in the Lower Parliament was a vaulted hall lined with damp sandstone benches. He smelled always of sour wool, wet boots, and cheap animal fat candles that sputtered in drafty iron sconces. It was here that commoners—tenement holders facing rent gouging, weavers seeking loom licenses, widow pensioners whose husbands had died digging town ditches—were allowed to wait on the pleasure of the Crown scriveners. The room had no fireplace, only two shallow cast-iron fire bowls burning green peat that produced more eye-stinging white smoke than warmth.
Tomas Reed stood by the northern archway, his ash-wood pack frame propped against a salt-stained pillar. Beside him, an elderly wheelwright named Coram sat with his hands wrapped around a battered tin cup of cold well water. Coram had been waiting three days to submit an invoice for fourteen oak cart-axles supplied to the town street cleaners. The under-clerks had turned him back twice. That was because his bill lacked the red wax seal of the Master Wheelwrights’ Warden. That guildmaster charged four silver coins just to open his counting-house door.
“They sit behind that oak counter like fat carp in a garden pond,” Coram muttered, his voice dry and gravelly from sixty years of breathing hickory sawdust. “They make you wait until your bread runs out. Then they tell you that the ink on your paper is the wrong shade of brown. My boys worked two weeks in the freezing rain to turn those axles, Reed. Now the landlord…
