From inside the Mason’s copy, the world came in through a grey window that did not quite fit its frame. Piers had got used to it in the first week. He could see the bar clearly enough, the iron ends of it in their brackets and the oak crossbar with its black knots, and he could see the road beyond, the mist lying in the ditches at dusk and the willows at the causeway’s end bent over like old men counting coins. What he could not see was his own face. He had to feel for that, as a man feels for a shaving-cut in the dark.
He had been counting for fifteen days.
He counted them the way he had counted bales on the Coldharbour quay, in his head, without fuss, one after another. Each morning he counted the day he had come into the Form, and each evening he counted the day he was still in it, and at the bottom of every tally he wrote a small mark on the inside of his grey wrist, where no one could see it and no one would wish to. He had counted sixteen marks that morning. He had been polite about it for sixteen days.
