The lodgers’ house in Lowgate was a long low hall of grey timber and sod, built into the slope below the Hold’s wall so that its back was dug into the hill and its front looked out over the Lamentine marsh. It had a hearth at one end and a row of plank beds along the walls, each with a blanket folded at its foot and a nail above it for the owner’s coat. Some of the beds had names cut into their headboards. Most did not. The lodgers had decided, at the threshing-floor meeting in the spring, that a name cut into wood was a kind of Writ, and that nobody should be bound to a bed by a knife.
Piers had been given the end bed nearest the hearth. He sat on it now in the dark, with his hands in his lap and the blanket round his shoulders, and he could not sleep.
It was the first night he had slept outside a Form since the eleventh day of the clause. He had been told that he would sleep well. He had been told that the stiffness would ease by the end of the week, and that the broadness would go out of his palms by the spring, and that the body would forget the shape of the grey copy’s grip in a month or two. He did not believe any of it. He lay on the plank bed and felt the Form’s weight still pressing on…
