By three in the morning, Master Barnaby Thorne’s printing room was a roaring engine of sweating bodies, creaking ash levers. The sharp, hot stench of boiled linseed oil and lampblack ink. The windows were blacked out with heavy felt blankets to keep light from escaping into the foggy alley. The heat from the two coke fire bowls had turned the room into a baker’s oven.
Tomas Reed worked at the central drying racks, unhooking broadsheets that had cured for four hours and stacking them into neat piles of fifty. His fingers were blackened with printer’s ink, the pigment sinking deep into the calluses of his palms and around the edges of his nails. Across his left forearm, the calfskin brace was damp with his own sweat. But he refused to loosen the laces. Moving two thousand pounds of paper needed total clockwork balance in the joint.
Hester Quill sat on an upturned nail keg beside the stacking bench, her glasses perched low on her nose, a horn sand-shaker in her hand. Every time Tomas completed a stack of fifty broadsheets, Hester inspected the top and bottom sheets, checking the registry mark at the foot of the column. When satisfied, she stamped each bundle with her bronze notary mark. Then she tied it with a length of raw, unwhitened hemp cord.
