Tallow read the Writ a third time, because a clerk does not let a document lie unread, and because he had been trying since dusk to write the day’s minute and had not yet found a verb he could stand behind.
Harrow had come up at dusk to say that the water stood at the sill. He had looked at the Writ for the length of a breath, and then he had gone down again with his lantern to measure the sill with his own hands, and he had left his stub of chalk on the Chamber table, rolled in a scrap of Lowgate linen, as though he had not decided whether it was a thing he would keep. Nobody else had come up the stair since. The candle-clock on its iron stand had burned down to the first ring, and the light lay across the table in a long yellow bar that stopped short of the Writ. Tallow sat in his own chair at the far end, with the census roll under his left elbow and the slate under his right, and he read.
He read with his finger under each line, the way he had been taught to read the wage-sheets in the Undercroft, when he was still learning what the wages were for.
