There are weeks in diplomacy when the silence is the story.

The Foreign Office on Chancery Row was quiet this morning. No cars arrived at the east entrance. No aides were observed entering or leaving the Delvarian consulate on Ashbury Lane. Consul Miren’s lights were off by nine o’clock on Saturday evening and have not been seen since.

This is, by every available indication, precisely what the parties intended.

The fifth session of the Kaelmar quiet channel talks is scheduled for Thursday. It is expected to be the final substantive meeting before a formal signing. The four technical annexes — vessel classification tables, insurance schedules, signalling protocols, and the rules governing the Joint Maritime Inspection Commission — are, according to diplomatic sources, in advanced draft form. Both delegations have had the texts since Friday.

“The work this week is being done in offices, not in meeting rooms,” said Professor Elias Thornbury of the Bobington Institute for Foreign Affairs. “The annexes are detail. They are critically important detail — vessel classification alone runs to forty pages — but they are not political. The political decisions were made on Thursday.”

The political decision, as Thornbury notes, was the agreement in principle reached at the fourth session on the twelfth of March: a Transit Corridor Framework encompassing all four pillars of the negotiation, from routing and inspection to insurance and review.

What remains is execution. And execution, in diplomatic terms, means the insurance question.

The framework caps transit-route premiums at 140 per cent of pre-crisis rates and requires claims to be adjudicated by a neutral panel in Fenmouth — echoing the structure of the 1962 Maritime Accords. But the framework’s insurance provisions apply only to policies written under the joint underwriting guarantee. Bobington’s domestic insurers must decide independently whether to participate.

On Friday, Tidewater Mutual confirmed it is “actively reviewing its position.” Two smaller firms are understood to be conducting parallel reviews. The Bobington Insurance Exchange has scheduled a closed session for Wednesday to discuss terms.

“The insurance market will follow the agreement, not lead it,” said Thornbury. “But the speed at which it follows will determine how quickly commercial traffic actually resumes. An agreement without underwriters is a document, not a trade route.”

Copper, meanwhile, opened this morning at 802 florins per tonne — the fourteenth consecutive session of decline and the first time the metal has traded below 810 since late January. The decline has been steady rather than dramatic, reflecting a market that has moved from pricing in risk to pricing in resolution.

The Eastern Spice Index, which closed Friday at 298, edged down to 296 this morning — functionally at its pre-crisis baseline of 295.

The Delvarian Northern Fleet remains in position in the northern channel. It has been there since February. No one expects it to move before the agreement is signed, and possibly not for some time after. But the fleet’s presence has not prevented the framework from advancing, and both delegations have treated it, in Thornbury’s phrase, as “weather rather than policy.”

Sir Duncan Hale and Count Viktor Soren have not been seen publicly since their joint exit from the Foreign Office at 7:14 PM on Thursday — the first time the two envoys used the same door. Undersecretary Marchetti read the joint statement from the steps. The word “satisfaction” appeared for the first time.

Thursday’s session is expected to begin at 10 AM. If the annexes are completed, a formal signing could follow within days. First commercial transits through the Kaelmar Strait — the first since early February — would be possible two to three weeks after that.

The strait has been effectively closed for five weeks. The quiet on Chancery Row this morning suggested that it will not be closed for much longer.