The salt caravans stopped coming in the first week of autumn, and Pell did not learn why until the rumour came up the Kitchen steps, which was the way she learned most things.
By then she had already started counting the sacks.
She had never counted them before. The Kitchen had always had sacks, and the sacks had always been there, stacked against the north wall under a tarred tarpaulin that smelt of mice and river damp. You took what you needed for the day and you never looked at the stack, because the stack was a thing that would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. But this autumn the stack had started to look at her. Every morning it had one fewer sack in its shadow than it had the morning before, and every morning she went to it with a lamp and a stick of chalk and a sour taste in her mouth, and she counted them out loud with Tallow, who had come down to the Kitchen especially and stood at the end of the stack with his minute-book, writing the figure in a column as if the figure were a sin.
