The Binder of Tides

The bindery at the end of Rue des Palis smelled of glue and boiled oak, a compact world of leather, thread, and the constant insistence of ink. Aurelia Voss moved between benches with the sort of small certainty that comes from years of repeating the same precise motions: she measured edges against her thumb, pressed the rule with a practiced hand, and listened to the paper answer with a soft, final sigh. Morning light fell through the single high window in an oblique strip, cutting dust like a ledger line across the room. Beyond the window the harbor’s noises beat against the stone—cries of hawkers, the slap of ropes, the low rumble of ships taking on water and men—but inside, Aurelia shaped quiet things into order.
She had been apprenticed to Mathieu Darrel since she was fifteen, his voice still a part of the furniture in the shop. He called his apprentices by the tools they liked best, and once he had told her she had a “binder’s eye,” meaning she saw what a book wanted to be. In truth what she saw was both more modest and more dangerous: small injustices, the way notes of debt nested under official seals, how a single erased line could erase a man’s rights. The bindery made things permanent; sometimes that permanence could be read like a verdict.
When the first bell of market hour knelled down the street, the door swung open and in came Sophie, Mathieu’s niece, cheeks pink with cold and pockets full of news. She dropped a scrap of paper onto Aurelia’s bench—a municipal handbill, the letters cramped and decisive.
“Have you heard?” Sophie asked before Aurelia could read it. “They’ve taken the Ledger from the Maritime Office.”
Aurelia’s thumb paused in the margin of a folio. The bindery’s work was small in the city’s scheme, its clients a scatter of schools, clergy, merchants. But if anything in a port city was private, it was the records of tides and quotas. The Ledger Sophie named was not merely a book of sums; it was the registry that decided which boats could draw nets in which stretches of water, a living document that bore the signatures of captains and midwives, tax exemptions and claims passed down by women who mended nets with their knees.
Sophie flung the handbill at her as if the paper were an accusation. “They say it’s gone. Stolen. They accuse those who work with old ledgers of forging entries—Mathieu says the Harbour Magistrate will demand every account be re-bound and inspected.”
The room narrowed. Aurelia felt the grain of the workbench under her palms as if the wood itself were listening. She thought of the fisherwomen on Quay Seven who sent Mateo’s cod to the bindery in exchange for repaired ledger pages, of the way Mathieu hummed when he stitched two leaves together with constant fingers. The word stolen tasted like salt. Outside, a bell struck a second time, and beyond it the sound of boots on cobbles grew impatient and close.