Harrow was repointing the north wall, where the frost had cracked a course along the seventh stone from the bottom, and he had been at it since the bell. He worked with the mortar-board on his hip and a small trowel in his right hand, and he counted every stone he set, aloud, in the flat patient voice he used for weather and walls. By noon he had set forty-one. By the time the Chamberlain came out to the wall in her good shoes, he had reached fifty-three, and the stone under his trowel was cold enough to make his fingers ache.
Velvet picked her way across the yard with her skirts held up out of the wet. She had a shawl over her shoulders and a face that had been arranged, carefully, to look as though she had come on business and not for the pleasure of watching a man work. She stopped at the foot of the wall-stair and looked up at him with her head on one side.
“Mason,” she said. “How many courses of that wall are sound?”
“Forty-one,” said Harrow, not looking round.
“Forty-one of what?”
“Courses.” He set a stone, tapped it level with the handle of the trowel, and counted it. “Fifty-four. The seventh is cracked. I am putting it back.”
