The joiner’s shed in Lowgate had a roof of old tarred sailcloth, a dirt floor that the lodgers swept every morning, and one good window of real glass that somebody had carried up from the Coldharbour cargo on the Lessary Road two winters ago, wrapped in straw, and had never been able to explain. Piers Hadley liked the window. It let in the light in long pale stripes across the sawdust, and in the mornings the stripes lay across the bench like the rules on a clerk’s ledger, and he could work to them without having to measure anything.
He had not expected to work at all. He had expected, when the Tollgate let him go and the Writ of Lodging was served on him in the Gatehouse with its seal still warm, that he would sit in a corner of the lodgers’ row and wait for something to be decided about him. Instead the lodgers had come round the first morning with their bad knees and their children and their questions, and one of them had asked him whether he could make a bench that a man with a bad knee could get up from without holding onto a wall. He had said yes before he thought about it. Then he had gone to the shed and looked at the planks and found that his hands already knew what to do with them.
