Mineral Ink and Slag

Silas's workshop was a vault next to the pit, with no light but what filtered, amber and dirty, through three skylights sealed with pitch. There, on the bench, he set up the die for the edicts every morning: he copied the minute sent down by the Cabinet onto a copper plate and fitted it into the pantograph so that, upstairs, the queen's hand would sign it in her gouty script. That afternoon the plate was still in the vise, and Silas looked at it without touching it, his left hand wrapped in a rag and his knuckles still raw. Stoker and stevedore gangs of the Lower Thames. He had engraved it himself. Letter by letter, without reading it, the way one engraves a serial number.

The simulator beat on the other side of the partition; from the bench he could see the brass ribs through the slit, opening and closing at sixty-eight a minute. Silas had spent the morning replacing the filed pallet with a spare, a softer one, the only one left in the Ordnance cabinet. It was holding. For now. Varley had gone up to the bedchamber with his jar of camphor and his apothecary's habit, and the pit had been left in that leaden silence in which a man begins to hear his own blood.

He heard no one come in. The floodgates swallowed footsteps; what warned him was the main beam, a sudden drop in pressure at the north sluice that raised the hair on his forearms and made the secondary steam column cough up a mouthful of slag.

In the gap between the two auxiliary boilers, where the heat bent the angles of the rivets, a sharp profile took shape. Ada Moss wore neither court finery nor the scribes' linen, but a coarse broadcloth coat crusted with saltpeter and coal dust, cinched by regulation straps from which hung a cylindrical case sealed in black wax. She was an inspector of the Intendancy and the only person in Whitehall who came down to the pit without being sent.

"Six minutes for the acid to eat through your sole if you step off the gratings, Inspector," Silas said without taking his eyes off the gauge.

Ada planted her boot on the cast-iron rib that collected no grease. A dry smile, without courtesy, tightened the corner of her lips as she lowered her hood.

"Your bellows are wheezing, Silas. The guard can smell the sulfur from the antechambers of Westminster. I've come to collect what you owe me before your own pistons crush your throat."

"If the guard could smell anything beyond its own office rot, you wouldn't be haggling on my grating."

Silas didn't ask what debt. With Ada Moss you never knew until she presented the bill.

On the other side of the partition, the rocker jumped. The mercury column climbed toward seventy-four and the bellows let out a hiss that tore through the air of the vault. Silas went through the low door into the pit with the purge wrench in his hand; Ada followed without being asked. Down the main beam came a telegraphic warning that shook the coal dust off the dials: upstairs someone had seen the velvet tremble.

"The wooden tongs!" he shouted. "Hold the secondary stem or you won't collect a single pound!"

Ada obeyed with an engineer's precision. Silas pressed his bare palm against the burning rocker to brake the cam; the burn wrung a grunt out of him, but the brass yielded and settled at exactly seventy. When he pulled his hand away, a shred of skin stayed stuck to the metal.

Ada dropped the tongs onto a zinc tray. From inside her coat she took a tube of blued brass whose black-wax seal had been opened with a surgeon's edge, without a nick in the wax.

"Your clumsiness with the calipers isn't what's going to bury us, Silas. This cylinder came down the North Tower shaft half an hour ago, straight into the Intendancy sluice."

She unrolled a thick sheet of vellum. The relief of the Great Seal blazed on the parchment, but it was not the filigree that left Silas breathless. It was the text: Order of dispersal and summary condemnation for the stoker and stevedore gangs of the Lower Thames. The same brittle script of the queen's hand, the same blind seals of the Secret Ordinance. And in the lower corner, covering the formula of the sentence, a stain of venous blood already turned black.

"She signed that two hours ago," Silas said. "I saw the acid fall on the sheet. It dissolved."

"Yours dissolved. This one was sealed before you sent the plate up." Ada tapped the stain with her fingernail. "And witnessed in blood: the blood of a prisoner who is still breathing in the dungeons upstairs. Someone else has the die of the seal, Silas. Someone else knows how to make your doll's handwriting."

Silas pressed his burned hand against his apron to hide the trembling of his tendons. He thought of the filed pallet, of the fine parallel striations. He thought about who could come down to the pit at night with a watchmaker's file without the beam giving warning.

"If the decree was already sealed, the midnight relief isn't coming to inspect the simulator."

"It's coming to clear away the slag." Ada put the parchment away. "We're not the court's artificers. We're the witnesses who aren't meant to see the dawn."

The rumble in the beam did not fade; it turned into a groan of compression that made the flasks on the shelves rattle. The lead floodgates of the passage dropped down their guides like a slaughterhouse blade, and the pneumatic bolts shot out their rods with a crack that ground the wax seals against the flagstones. Silas pulled the decompression lever with his burned hand. It flopped loose between his fingers: they had purged the pressure from above. They were walled in.

The flames in the gas tulips shrank to tiny blue crowns. An icy mist, pumped in from the sluices to wash the chamber, began to slide along the floor. At the far end, the wheel of the inspection lock turned slowly and spat out a breath of brine.

Through it came three figures in tarred leather aprons and watertight felt hoods. They carried no halberds and no arrest warrants. In their gloved hands gleamed dissecting scalpels, curved blades made to part living joints as easily as one strips down a gear.