The Gatehouse board was the only part of the Register anyone could read without a clerk. It hung on the wall beside the stair, under a sheet of oiled cloth to keep the damp off, and it carried the Hold’s first line in the Ink, Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing, in letters that had been cut into the wood so long ago that the grain had grown up round them. Below that was a column of notices, most of them struck through, and below the notices the Tollgate Clause, copied out in brown Lessaran print and nailed there by Tallow’s own hand on the day the clause woke.
Piers Hadley came to stand in front of it at the second bell, when the Mason’s copy had been carried in from the Yard and set against the passage wall for the night’s rest, its grey hands folded over its chest.
He was inside it. The grey face was turned toward the board, and the broad grey hands hung at the Form’s sides, and the factor’s own polite eyes looked out of the Mason’s features with the particular tiredness of a man who had counted all day. Tallow saw him from the back leaves, where he had been sitting with the minute-book and the gate-book open side by side on the table. He could see the Form’s face in the lamp’s light. It was grey and drawn and very polite, and it had a look about the eyes that Tallow had…
