At nine o’clock in the morning, the bells of the capital ceased their wild, irregular alarm.
For three beats of a man’s heart, a heavy, breathless silence hung over the wet slate roofs of the valley. A silence so deep that the rush of the Silt River against the bridge piers could be heard two miles away.
And then, from the high central spire of Saint Jude in Tanners’ Row, the great tenor bell struck. A deep, slow, measured boom that shook the water droplets from the telephone wires of the sky like falling pearls.
BONG.
One beat. Two beats. Three beats.
BONG.
It wasn’t the alarm knell of a riot. It was the solemn, liturgical knell used for the proclamation of a new sovereign or the ratification of a holy treaty.
On the front stone porch of Saint Jude’s Church, standing upon the fifth step above the sea of six thousand drenched weavers, tanners, and washerwomen who filled the square, stood Father Anselm. The old priest was eighty-two years old, his black cassock patched at the elbows with coarse wool. His hands shook as he held up the white linen broadsheet that apprentice Olla had delivered through the bakery loft.
