Quinton's, the upper room

Quinton's coffee room stands at the corner of Copyists' Row, below the precinct wall where it runs north-west, where the chapter's copyists rent single rooms in tall, quiet houses. It grew up with the archive trade. The copyists come down in the morning to compare what they have found, the London and Maidstone papers lie on the tables, and the archive's discoveries reach the rest of the city first in this room. Edmund Quinton keeps it, and behind his counter he keeps the wager book in which the city's gentlemen place their bets.

On two evenings a week the upper room belongs to the Canterbury Gloam. Canterbury's form of the fashion is antiquarian before it is political. Its members, young copyists, clerks, minor clergy, recent leavers of the grammar school and the sons and daughters alike of professional households, gather in charcoal coats and old silver, read copied pre-war verse, set viols to it, and maintain that ruins are of cultural interest. The room keeps no iron and no galvanic horns, unlike the Gloam rooms of Cambridge and London. The chapter calls the meetings inadvisable, and the city considers them harmless.

The room is better known than its members would like. Young Mr Julius Rolvenden, only son of the collector, has adopted the charcoal coat and the upstairs evenings, and at two in the morning the precinct walker came upon him in the ruins near the old infirmary ground, a lantern and rubbing paper in hand. He cannot hold his wine, so whatever the Gloam does is common talk in Copyists' Row before breakfast. The Row believes a Gloam party has found one of the lost Obedience War burial grounds near Hackington using a rod and a terrier someone copied. Nobody has seen a spade, and Judith Harbledown says such grounds are found at a desk or never. Downstairs there is forty pounds in the book on whether the nave-roof fund reaches eleven hundred pounds by Michaelmas, and Judith Harbledown has called the book indecent in Quinton's own room.

A stranger who sits an hour in the coffee room will hear more news than anywhere else in the city. A company asked to escort a Gloam party anywhere after dark, especially near the precinct or outside the walls, should first ask the precentor whether the ground is ground the chapter will not allow to be broken.