The Engraver of Thorne Hall

Thomas Merrick had the smell of oil and wet paper in his bones. He learned to read the press by the rhythm of its breath: the slow inhale of the platen, the sharp exhale when the clamp fell, the small, obedient cough of loose lead type. At twenty-four he moved among gutters of ink as if he had been born beneath a compositor's bench; his nails held a steady grey, and his hands bore the faint crescents of many small tools. Daylight arrived in Fleet Street as ribbons of smoke and the clatter of carts. Fog lay heavy in the lanes like wool. Thomas kept his cap low against it and kept his tongue low in the presence of Samuel Pritchard, master of the bindery and his employer, who measured a man's worth by the steadiness of his hand and the temper of his silence.

The shop was a cavern: racks of boards, tins of shellac, a row of ingrained screwplates, and the press that had taken a trade's share of nails and curses. Pritchard spoke while he worked, the way an instrument of trade speaks—always to the rhythm of some unseen metronome. 'Mind the edge,' he said, pointing at a copper plate Thomas had just filed, the one for the elliptical seal of a baronet. 'A gentleman's crest is as much a promise as a thing upon paper. Break it, and you break the promise.'

Thomas smiled without shame. Promises were what he liked best; they were the clean lines that kept a world from fraying. He had learned to see in blankness: the way a blank sheet held a future and was itself a kind of oath. That morning the future arrived in a package that smelled of damp and old leather. It bore the mark of Thorne Hall—a shield, halved and quartered with a small fox rampant in the corner—yet the impression had been roughly sanded away, as though someone had tried to wipe the heraldry from a thing that had once been whole.

Pritchard unrolled the ragged paper with the impatience of a man who expected neat troubles. 'An estate commission,' he said. 'Hollows and old fortunes. You will prepare a copy, Thomas. Mark it clean. They will not forgive slovenliness.'

Thomas watched the curl of the paper with a quiet curiosity that felt almost like hunger. Beneath the rubbed crest there remained, in the paper's shadow, a faintness: an indentation like the memory of a name. He set the loupe—an ordinary magnifier—against the mark and leaned in. Traced in the faintest blind impression, a letter appeared, as if waking in sleep: the tail of an S, the curve of a less common T. A blot of something like a child's hair lay folded with the letter, pressed thin by years. The thing thudded in his chest: an absence that was also a question. He slid the paper toward himself and folded his fingers over the small relic as one would over an ember.