Lord Chamberlain Keith’s voice was hoarse, stripped of all its courtly polish. He stood beside the Chief Advocate’s table with his hands clasped tightly before his velvet-clad chest. His lace cuffs shook against his doublet.
“What’s your claim, sir?” Keith asked, his tone a mixture of lingering disbelief and exhausted surrender. “If you’ll not accept forty-two manors, if you’ll not accept twelve thousand gold sovereigns anually from the Sluice issues, what price do you demand of the King’s Exchequer for saving the state from financial ruin? Name the sum. The Treasury will write a bill upon the Merchant Bank of the Capital.”
Tomas Reed didn’t hesitate. He hadn’t spent forty-two days cross-referencing seventy-four repositories of fraud without understanding the exact, unbending value of honest human labor.
He reached inside his worn leather vest, past the brass cargo ring that had rubbed his collarbone raw through ten seasons of hauling. Then he brought out a folded sheet of common rag paper. It wasn’t fine sheepskin thick parchment lit up with gold leaf. It was coarse, gray-toned paper made from old linen rags beaten into pulp at the Reed Bank water-mill, showing the faint wire-ribbing of the drying frame across its surface.
