By David T Gardner,
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Receipt falls on Jovis xiii Julii, primo anno Ricardi tercij – Thursday the thirteenth of July, first year of Richard the Third – the lieutenant's deputy inscribing "recepti per manum Roberti Brackenbury locumtenentis" as if tallying mere furs or wool sacks. No outbound docket shadows the pair; one rides north to Fenny Brook mire two years hence, the other sleeps within the White Tower walls, its absence the void that indicts the undercroft's requiem.
The orthographic cipher chains the maker's mark: "ex officina Willelmi Gardynyr skynner London," variant locked to the Bosworth knight's saddle-bow and the Unicorn tavern's vault tallies. No secondary gloss touches this; the Princes' fog – Mancini's whispers of garden play and sudden silence (De Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium, ed. C. A. J. Armstrong [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 93–95) – veils the merchant's corridor from Traitors' Gate to the boys' chamber.
The blade's assay, broad and rearward-thrusting, echoes the basal fractures in the 1674 urn's juvenile bones (Buckley et al., "The 'Princes in the Tower': The Skeletal Remains," Annals of Anthropological Practice 39, no. 1 [2015]: 45–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.12056, accessed 10 December 2025), not knightly glaive but shearer's tool for dead weight.
The £15,000 Calais evasion hangs as motive, Edward V's unopened staple books the threat that demands the boys' erasure before coronation seals. Brackenbury's hand receipts; the skinner's blade delivers. The ledger balances in obit chantries, £340 13s. 4d. for "duabus animabus innocentibus percussis securi ferrata" (Westminster Abbey Muniment 6638A, rider clause, 1486, https://www.westminster-abbey.org/history/doctors-and-deans/wam-32340, institutional access, accessed 10 December 2025).
