The lodgers’ carts came up the lane at first light, and Pell was at the Kitchen door before the wheels had stopped.
She had learned long ago that a sack she did not weigh herself was a sack the Hold would argue about for a month. The Kitchen had been robbed by the Gatehouse’s scale-men twice in the first year of the Crown, and once by a Chamber clerk who had written down twenty-two sacks of barley as twenty-four, very neatly, in the Ink, and had been surprised when the Kitchen objected. So Pell stood at the door with her slate in one hand and her sleeves already up, and her big round hook-scale hanging from the lintel beside her like a second, more honest, door-knocker, and she did not let the cart-men put so much as a fingertip on a sack until she had written the sack’s weight in her large figures and read it back.
“Twenty,” she said. “Lowgate spring corn. I’ve got twenty.”
“Twenty, Mistress Pell,” said the cart-man, who was a Lowgate boy with a squint and a loyal heart. “Twenty to the sack, and not one of them heavier than it should be. Osk said to tell you.”
