Tamsin climbed the chapel’s forty-four steps at dusk, with a lamp in one hand and a bucket of goat’s milk in the other, because she had decided that the bell should have something to drink before it was eaten.
She had not meant it as a joke, though the Lowgate children would have laughed at it, and some of the Hands probably would have too, in the ordinary way, with their heads on one side. But she had been thinking about it since the division. The bell had not been fed. Nobody had fed it in two hundred years, not as goats are fed, or children, or a worker at the forge, with bread and milk and a warm word to go with them. It had been hung up in its tower and rung for weddings and funerals and the changing of the watch, and then it had been left alone with its crack and its dust and its rope, and the Hold had looked up at it from the yard and thought of it as a thing that did not need anything. She did not think that was right. Even a stone needed a little warmth in winter.
So she carried the milk up the stair. It was warm when she left the pens, and it cooled slowly as she climbed, and the bucket knocked against her knee at every turn, and the lamp’s flame trembled in the draught from the narrow windows. She counted the steps. She did…
