Tallow went down to the Sallow Ford at first light with a slate under his arm, because a Hand’s seat that comes awake without a vote needs a minute of its own, and because the Chamber would ask him for the minute before breakfast whether he had taken it or not.
The mist lay on the water in a grey skin. The ferry was tied up at the landing with its rope made fast to the post and its canvas dripping, and the carved wave on its stern caught the first pale light from the east and seemed, to Tallow’s eye, faintly self-satisfied. The six carts of the Lessaran consignment had gone over in the night. Their tracks were in the mud of the far bank, and their drivers had slept in the lee of the causeway wall with their coats over their heads. Nobody had been drowned. Nobody had been thanked. He had been told that before he came down, by a Lowgate boy who had run up the lane with the news with his mouth full of bread.
The Lessaran clerk had got there first.
Marle stood on the landing in a travelling cloak that did not fit him, with a small leather purse held in front of his chest as if it were a hymnbook. His cold had gone. In its place was the flushed, bright look of a man who has been up all night working out what he is going to say and has decided…
