Pell had said she would not go down to the ford. She had said it at the Kitchen table, at the candle-clock, with her arms folded over her apron and her chin up, and she had meant it. The Kitchen was the Kitchen. A cook who left the grate on the first morning of a fair was a cook who would find the bread burned on the third, and the Hold had no bread to spare for burning.
But the paid models had to be paid in bread, and the bread had to be carried, and the Watch’s boys who had been sent to carry it were fourteen years old and had never been trusted with a whole sack. So on the second day she had put on her second-best apron and climbed up on the bread-cart with her knees under her chin, and had told the carter that if he dropped one loaf on the causeway she would bake him into the next one.
She had got there in the afternoon. She had weighed the bread herself, against the Assembly’s scale, and had watched the clerk write the weight in the margin, and had told him he had written it wrong. Then she had paid the fisher, who thanked her, and the soldier, who said that the bread was better than the Assembly’s, and the dairy-woman’s sister, who ate a heel of it standing up in the yard with her eyes shut. She had not paid the faces. Faces…
