The air inside the High Parliament had grown suffocatingly hot by noon. Three hundred candles burned in the iron brackets. It filled the chamber with the sweet, sickening odor of melting animal fat and wet wool cloaks. Outside, the rain beat against the leaded high window row windows with the fury of a November gale. But inside, the silence was broken only by the dry rustle of parchment rolls and the rhythmic pacing of the assembly clerks.
Speaker Haddon stood before his gold-trimmed chair, his silver-mounted glasses resting halfway down his red, bulbous nose. ‘The question before the House,’ Haddon announced, his voice echoing off the carved limestone stone wall-brackets, ‘is that Bill 914-A, being an Act for the Crushing weight of Vagrant Audit Classes, the Preservation of Public Credit. The Regulation of Town Ledgers, be now read a second time and advanced to the Committee of the Whole.’
On the floor of the chamber, sixty guildmasters sat in their fur-trimmed robes, their arms crossed, their expressions set in cold, unmoving triumph. Opposite them, on the narrow northern benches, forty independent burgesses—coopers, tanners, wagon drivers, and village aldermen—sat with clenched fists and pale faces.
From the public gallery, Tomas Reed watched the clerks step forward with their brass division bowls. Beside him sat Sile Rook, his heavy shoulders wedged into the narrow bench, his hooked pruning blade left downstairs with the gate-keepers but his unblinking gaze fixed on Chancellor Vane like a hawk watching a field mouse. Behind them sat…
