Ossane had been a guest in the Hold for half a year, and she had become, she thought, a rather good one. Guests were judged by the same standards as cheese. They were expected to improve slightly with keeping, to be offered the best of whatever was in season, and to know, without being told, where the slop-pail stood and which of the bread-hall’s benches had a rocking leg. She knew all three. She had learned the Hold’s bread schedule within a week of her arrival, and the names of the Hands who brought it up the stair, and the particular order in which the Kitchen’s women liked to be thanked, which was the reverse of the Chancery’s. She had taught Master Tallow to write a clause that bound without shouting, and he had taken to it with the eager, faintly guilty enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting all his life for a better grammar and had been too polite to ask for one.
She was writing to her Chancellor. The guest room’s window was open a finger’s breadth, to let in the marsh air, and the cold came through the gap and lifted the edges of her paper. She weighted the sheet with the Hold’s brass inkwell and went on writing in her own careful, flowing hand, which had been trained by a governess who had believed that a lady’s letters should be legible at a distance of six feet.
