By the ninth hour of the morning, the financial foundation of Crown-Reach was undergoing an earth-shaking shift that no minister or parliamentary decree could arrest. The broadsheets had done what forty years of polite petitions had failed to achieve. They had transformed the hidden, drowned misery of the river bottoms into a public balance sheet that every shopkeeper, artisan, and apprentice could understand.
In the Grand Exchange. There, the merchant princes traded foreign debentures and canal shares under the painted ceiling of the central hall, the morning bell rang to an air of stunned, icy total numbness. The price of High court canal debentures—the risky paper that Vane had used to fund his political patronage—dropped by thirty-five percent in forty minutes as brokers scrambled to dump shares that were revealed to be backed by non-existent flood assets.
Tomas Reed walked through the lower arcades of the Exchange, his pack frame on his back, his iron heel-plates clicking on the polished marble flags. He didn’t look at the wild brokers waving their parchment slips. He walked straight to the public notice board where Master Thorne had pinned broadsheet number one hundred.
Beside him walked Burgess Alden, his cooper’s apron replaced by his formal town gown of dark wool trimmed with rabbit fur. The old burgess was smiling, a grim, triumphant smile that had not touched his face in fifteen years of council service.
