The season closed on the five-hundredth line of the Register’s count, and Tallow printed the Charter of Remaining’s box on the last page, as the Register required, in the Ink, with his own hand and no one else’s.
He did it at the clerk’s table in the Gatehouse, in the grey light before the morning bell, with the lamp turned down and the rain gone from the leads at last and the whole Hold quiet beneath him. He had sharpened the pen the night before. He had laid a clean leaf flat under the lamp and ruled its margins with the rule, and he had written the Charter’s Entry number at the top, which was 0493, because the Charter had been entered under that number on the day of the Split and the Register did not change a number once it had been given. Then he began the box.
He had printed a great many boxes. He had printed the Edict and the Recovery and the Oath, and the Charter of the Articles, and the old Charter of Forms, with its Tithe of one Form lent, and the Tollgate repeal, with its long column of day-lines. He had never before printed one that he hoped would never be sprung.
