Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: The Mould

The kitchen door banged open beside me.

A cook in a stained apron came out to the flour sacks and stopped dead.

"Who are you?"

I held up the basket. "Bread. From the Street of Lamps. For the little ones."

I gave her the widow's whole basket and walked out the carters' gate.

Tristram was at the counter with the baby asleep in the sling on his chest.

"The footman's working for Honoria now," I said.

Tristram's hand stopped on the baby's back. "Then the whipping was a show."

"A show for your grandfather. And the matron keeps her book behind a wall full of porters."

"So we can't reach hers."

"So we take the other half. The moulds. Whatever the guildmaster writes his work down in."

"Tonight," he said. "Before he burns them."

The widow took the baby at eleven.

She didn't ask where we were going.

The guild hall was dark at the bottom of the street.

One window still had a candle, up in the guildmaster's rooms.

Tristram lifted the back shutter's bar with my bench knife through the crack.

I knew the way to his bench in the dark.

The cloth was still over the back.

Under it, nothing.

"He's moved them," I breathed.

The bench had a drawer with an iron lock.

I took my father's hammer out of my coat pocket and hit the lock once, hard, with a cloth over it.

It sprang.

Inside the drawer were the three plaster moulds, wrapped in a rag.

Under them was a thin book bound in brown leather.

Tristram held a candle stub low while I turned the pages.

Halfway through, in a hand that had grown careful: Sun. Yellow. Three casts. R.H. Paid.

And under it: One more cast. For the Keeper. Paid in her own silver.

"Both sides," Tristram whispered.

Above us a floorboard creaked.

Tristram pinched out the candle.

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