Tallow went back into the census hall the next morning, because he could not sit still while the sprig lay below him in the water. He told himself it was for the minutes. He had left a gap in the Census Articles that needed filling, and a clerk who left a gap in a Chamber’s record was a clerk who would be asked, one day, to explain it. That was true. It was also true that he had lain awake half the night listening to the rope ring under the lake, and that every time it rang he had found himself counting the notes against the number of stairs in the tower, and that the counting had given him no rest at all.
He climbed in through the high window at first light, with the pocket-lamp in his teeth and the wooden rule in his coat. The silt had settled a little overnight. The pool on the floor was clearer, and he could see the tiles under it, grey and square and laid in a pattern of diagonals that no one had walked on for two hundred years. The shelves stood as they had stood the day before, bowed and swollen, their books fused into their own damp bricks. Nothing had moved. Nothing, Tallow thought, would move again in this room unless someone came to move it.
