Victor eyed him. Was Erasmus hiding a message there? Victor laughed at himself for even wondering. If Erasmus was hiding a message, he was hiding it in plain sight.

"Way! Make way there!" bawled the teamster atop the brewery wagon. He cracked his whip above the four big, strong horses hauling the cask-filled wain. Then he cracked it again, this time in front of the nose of a man who didn't step aside fast enough to suit him.

The man swore, but flattened himself against the side of a building nonetheless. He wore a knife on his belt-who didn't?- but a man with a belt knife was even more disadvantaged against a bullwhip than against the rapiers some gentlemen still carried to mark their status. You had to be able to judge when picking a fight made sense and when it was only foolishness.

Victor Radcliff had stepped to one side as soon as the teamster started shouting. The heavy wagon clattered past, iron tires banging and sparking on cobblestones. Puddles from the last rain lingered between the stones and in the holes where a few of them had come up. The wagon wheels splashed passersby, but not too badly.

A sign hanging above a small shop creaked in the morning breeze, Custis Cawthorne, printing and persuasions, the neatly painted letters proclaimed. The breeze carried the smells of sea and smoke and sewage: like any other town, Hanover dumped its waste into the closest river, for ultimate disposal in the ocean.

Manuscript under his arm, Victor ducked inside. A bell over the door jangled. The shop was gloomy inside. It smelled of wood and paper and sweat and ink. A harassed-looking 'prentice fed sheets into a press, one after another. A printer worked the lever again and again. Another 'prentice stacked the newly printed broadsheets.

Custis Cawthorne watched the work from behind the counter. "There'll be a mistake somewhere," the printer said mournfully. "There always is. Perfection, they say, is for the Lord alone. They don't usually know what they're talking about, but when it comes to printing I'm persuaded they have a point… And how are you, your Radcliffishness?"