He read the letter in the gatehouse with the door shut and the Writ of Hearth holding the room, because he could not bear to read it anywhere the Hold could see him doing it.
The copy lay flat on the table under the lamp. It was written on the grey Wing paper in charcoal, and the Advocate’s hand had made it nearly as slanting as his sister’s, though not exactly, because the Advocate had been taught to write in a tidier school. He could see where her hand had shaken. Three of the village names had a faint blur at the edge of each stroke, as if the charcoal had been pressed harder than it should have been and then lifted in a hurry. He did not mind the blur. He thought it was the most honest thing on the leaf.
The first column was the struck names. He read them one under another, slowly, as Tallow would have read a Census, with his finger barely touching the paper. Sallowfen. Sallow Reach. Hollin Reach, with a note beside it in the margin that said the well counted right. The headmen’s names, in the Census’s spelling and then in his sister’s. The hearths. The grain, in sacks. And at the foot of every line, in the careful unfashionable letters that his sister had been taught in the nursery, the one word that the Chancery had put there for every village it had ever taken off its roll.
