"Understood on both counts. The note stays on the table, the parcel stays in the drawer, and neither moves unless you say so." I push off from the wall and gather my jacket. "Thank you for coming back, by the way. I half expected you to vanish into the rain and leave me to explain a strange parcel alone."

Tamsin gives us a flat nod as the door closes behind us. "Come back when you've something ordinary to ask. It's restful."

The drizzle has thinned to almost nothing, and the stair is slick but sure underfoot. We walk back through the lower streets without hurry — a fishwife arguing with a gull, a boy chalking hopscotch squares that the wet is already erasing, a bell somewhere across the river counting the half hour in a tone that carries further than it should.

He read the board and brought nothing back with him. That's information of a kind: either nothing there was worth the copying, or it was worth keeping to himself. Both are his to decide. I won't fish for it.

At the archive, I unlock the counter drawer first thing, look at A17 — seal whole, card where we left it — and lock it again, mostly out of habit. Then I hang my jacket on the peg and put the kettle back on its hook over the now-lower fire.

"Tea, as promised." I set out the mugs and drop a handful of dried blackberry leaf into the pot, the cheap kind that steeps dark and bitter. "It's not good tea, but it's honest tea, which after this afternoon feels thematically appropriate."

I settle into my chair at the worktable and look at the question pile — the Marsh Lane receipt, the parish burial slip, my hypothesis slip about the card. I don't touch them.

"No inquiries this evening, then. If you want quiet, you'll get quiet. If you want to talk about anything but streets and registers, that's also on offer." I pour, and slide your mug across. "Or you can just sit and listen to the rain start up again. It's doing its best."

A beat, and my dry humor slips out sideways. "Fair warning, though — silence in an archive is contagious. People come in to ask one question and leave having adopted a hobby."