The basement of the Bellwether Print Works smelled of boiled linseed oil, turpentine. The sharp, vinegar tang of lead type washed in lye. Located three doors down from the Water Gate, the low-vaulted brick cellar shook with the deep, underground clank of two heavy wooden screw-presses. Overhead, suspended from hemp cords strung between the iron gas-brackets, hundreds of damp paper sheets hung drying like white laundry in the draft.
Tomas Reed stood beside the composing stone, his thumbs hooked into the leather strap of his calfskin wrist brace. Across the table, Master Printer Vane—an ink-stained man of sixty with a green baize apron pinned over his rounded belly—was setting a line of cast-metal type with practiced, flicking fingers. Each lead letter clicked into the brass composing stick with the sharp care of a clockwork gear catch.
“Forty-two picas of text,” Vane muttered around the stub of an unlit clay pipe. “One pica for the left rule, one for the right rule. Total measure: forty-four characters. It’s an ungodly narrow measure, Tomas. Scribes like to sprawl. You give a country clerk forty-four spaces and he’ll spend half his morning hyphenating words at the line ends.”
“Good,” Hester Quill said from the stool beside the ink-trough, where she was paring down a fresh bundle of Dutch goose quills with her ivory knife. “Let him hyphenate. When a clerk has to count his letters, he doesn’t have room for flowery preambles. Under Section Twelve of the Pan-River Charter, any registry entry containing unchecked…
