Joss counted the lodgers’ sacks in the Lowgate granary-house on the morning after the ballot, with the children standing by to watch the numbers go down. He had asked them to come. He had asked the mothers too, and the old men who sat on the bench by the door with their pipes unlit, and Mother Harle, who had been fed by the first oven and had been cross about the sack of barley that bore her name ever since the Hold’s bread had been measured in the Chamber. Joss wanted them to see the count with their own eyes. A count that was only written was a count that somebody else could change.
The granary-house was a long low barn built of Lowgate timber and the grey Lamentine stone, with a flagged floor, a door at each end, and a row of wooden bins down the middle that had been made by the lodgers’ own cooper, who was Joss, in the first winter. He had made them badly, he said. They had been too narrow for a sack to turn in, and too low for a child to see into, and he had been asked by the mothers every year since to make them better, and had always said he would, and had not.
