The quarry stone came up from the Mason’s yard in the middle of the week, and it came cut to the wrong gauge.
Harrow knew it before the cart reached the ridge. He had heard the first block knocked by the cart’s tailboard as it came over the causeway’s last plank, and the note had been a fraction too high, the note of a block that had been dressed a finger too narrow for the course it was meant to fill. He did not need to measure it to be sure. He measured it anyway, because a Mason who has been right before without measuring is a Mason who will eventually be wrong without knowing it. The block was a finger too narrow. Every block on the cart was the same. The quarryman had cut them by a template that had been left out in the rain and had shrunk.
He sent the cart back down the causeway with an apology that was also a complaint. He wrote it on the back of a lodger’s chalk-board, in letters large enough for the carter to read at the ford: Your gauge is a finger short. Send the blocks back cut right, and the Mason will forgive you the road. The carter laughed, and took the board, and drove off with the blocks still in the bed, because the Mason had told him to and the Mason was known in the marsh for keeping his word.
