By the fifth hour of morning, long before the sun cleared the eastern sea-mists, Broad Street had ceased to be a thoroughfare of commerce. It had become a sea of human desperation. Word had leaked through the taverns and bakeries of the lower wards during the night that the High Court trial had frozen the accounts of the Silver Weft Banking Trade ring. That the bank’s reserves were backed by fraudulent, unredeemable quest paper.
By sunrise, more than five thousand people were packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the four hundred yards of granite paving between the Bank Stone porch and the River Wharf. They weren’t wealthy merchants or risky investors. They were the smallholders, the artisans, and the working people of the capital: master coopers in stiff leather aprons holding three-crown deposit chits. Seamstresses with red, needle-pricked fingers clutching small wooden savings tokens. Retired soldiers in frayed red coats holding disability scrip. And draymen who had deposited their quarterly wages to pay their tenement rent on the morrow.
A freezing winter fog hung over the crowd, turning breath into thick white clouds and coating their woolen cloaks in icy dew. The mood was not yet a riot. But it had the terrifying, underground shaking of a river rising toward a weakened dike. People didn’t shout. They murmured in low, urgent voices, their eyes fixed on the heavy bronze-plated double doors of the banking house.
