Joss Hallet had put on his clean coat before the sun was up, because the lodgers had asked him to speak for them and he had never yet been asked to speak anywhere in a coat that had holes in it. The coat was grey wool, with horn buttons, and it had belonged to a cooper’s journeyman who had gone to the marsh-towns for work and not come back. Joss had mended the elbows himself. He was not ashamed of the mending. He was only careful of it.
He carried the lists down the path from Lowgate to the lower gate in a leather satchel that had been a salt-bag once and had a faint white bloom on its inside seam. There were eleven sheets in the satchel. Each sheet held one row for each house in the village, and each row gave the house’s name, its number of children, its number of grown mouths, and the number of sacks it drew from the Hold’s ration in the next thirty days, one sack to a mouth. Some rows had no sacks at all. Those were the houses that fed themselves from the marsh-trade and the gardens behind the lane, and Joss had written their names anyway, in their own column, because a name was a name even when it did not eat from the Hold. Joss had figured them himself, at his own table, with a stub of chalk and the back of a shingle, twice.
