I turn the card fully into the lamplight and hold it steady so you can look without touching. "Come around the counter. Better to see it yourself than take my word for it."

The card is a standard ward-records delivery slip, cream stock, slightly warped at one corner as if it once got damp and dried again. Two lines sit beneath the recipient's name, written in the same brown-black ink, the same neat clerk's hand.

North Street, ward records office.
Marsh Lane, ward records office.

"Note the ink first," I say. "Both lines were written in one sitting. The flow is even, no pause where a writer would hesitate or dip the pen again. This isn't a correction overwritten later. Someone wrote both addresses deliberately, in sequence, and saw nothing wrong with it."

I tilt the card further. The lamplight catches a faint sheen in the second line. "Marsh Lane has a slight metallic glitter in the ink. Odd for a clerk's slip. Cheap iron-gall ink doesn't do that."

The parcel itself is wrapped in waxed canvas, tied with cord, and closed with a dull lead seal stamped with an accession mark: A17. The seal is intact, uncracked, pressed cleanly.

"The seal is a Black Archive pattern, so this passed through our intake, whoever sealed it. The canvas is dry now but the warp in the card suggests it traveled through wet weather. Rowan came in from the quay side, if I recall his usual route."

I set the card back under the weight. "What I can't see from here is which address the parcel was actually meant for, or why a clerk would write both without noticing. That's a question for the public register, or for Rowan when he returns."

_The glitter bothers me. I've seen register filings mixed into ink once before, and that was a forgery case. But one detail isn't a conclusion._

"Anything you want a closer look at, or shall we try the register?"