The Penny Queue

A long line of dockworkers, fishwives, and laborers stretches outside an old net loft on the pier. One by one, each worker steps inside with a single copper penny, emerges holding a torn page from an account book, and burns the sheet to ash in a glowing brazier by the doorway.

Across the street, two hired debt collectors wearing Garnet & Mossop coats watch sourly—unwilling to force their way past forty burly longshoremen.

Nineteen years old with her shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows, Dorrit Sayle stands beside a net-maker's bench where the heavy debt book is chained, tearing out pages one by one.

"Pay me a copper penny so it counts as a legal sale rather than theft—and look closely at these pages first!" She spins the open book around: page after page of supposed worker debts are written in the exact same handwriting and dated the exact same afternoon. "Garnet & Mossop forged hundreds of fake debts against illiterate dockworkers who couldn't read the totals! The partners don't care about arresting me—they just want this book burned before a Guild auditor inspects it!"

Though the forty dockworkers don't lay a finger on you, they form a solid human wall across your boarding ramp, staring at the debt book tucked under the girl's arm. Meanwhile, a Crown Excise cutter drops anchor just outside the harbor and sends an armed rowboat toward the pier.

Standing in the bow, the Crown Excise inspector calls up to you: "That account book is evidence in a royal tax investigation, hunter! Hand down both the book and the clerk—Crown Excise does not pay private bounties!"

Garnet & Mossop maintain an armed company cutter specifically to hunt down fleeing debtors. Old and heavily patched, she charges out of the harbor ten minutes behind you with the two furious debt collectors standing on her foredeck.

Sitting atop the chained debt book on your hatch cover, Sayle watches the pursuing vessel. "They used that very boat to seize my mother's weaving loom," she tells you. "She's slower than she looks."

In a counting room thick with the smell of sealing wax, senior partner Cato Mossop cradles the recovered debt book like a long-lost child before counting out your bounty to the last copper.

Right in front of you, Mossop rips out all the pages forged in the same handwriting and feeds them straight into his iron stove, keeping only the legitimate accounts. Held between two burly collectors, Dorrit Sayle watches the evidence burn. "Will that be all, Captain?" Mossop asks smoothly.

Guild Examiner Elspeth Senna—a sharp-eyed auditor with a magnifying glass hung around her neck on a ribbon—spends two silent hours inspecting the chained debt book before summoning the city guard and ordering a pot of tea.

"The house of Garnet & Mossop will be shut down tomorrow morning, and every single debt forged in this handwriting is hereby declared null and void. The Guild rewards captains who uncover commercial fraud of this magnitude—and Miss Sayle insists that you choose the form of our thanks."