The Chamber sat at the candle-clock table on casks and benches, because the table had been built for a Hold of two hundred people and there were nine Hands now and a prince, and nobody had yet thought to buy more chairs.
Tallow had the Mouth for the reading, by custom. He had it for the length of the Turn’s first candle, and he intended to use every finger-width of it. The minute-book lay open before him with its ribbon in the gutter. The clock’s brass pin stood at the first mark. Beyond the Great Hall’s doors, the morning sun came through the high slits and laid pale bars across the flags, and every bar was a stone the Hold had counted, because Harrow had counted them all twice.
The Mantle came to the table in the Clerk’s shape.
That was the Hold’s decision, not the Mantle’s. A Writ should be read by a ledger, the Chamber had agreed the evening before, since a ledger had no temper and no stake in what it said. So the grey mass of the body came forward through the Great Hall’s far doorway, a little more slowly than usual, and it gathered itself at the table’s end into a thin, narrow, bespectacled figure with a pen behind its ear and a leather apron over the coat. It was Tallow’s own Form, the Record copy he had woken into, and he had never once seen it from across a table.
