Joss Hallet stood on the step of the lodgers’ hall with his hands on his hips and his back to the yard, and told the lodgers how long they had left.
“Five days,” he said. “By the Bench’s count.”
There was a murmur from the yard. It was a late-afternoon yard, with the sun gone behind the Hold’s west wall and the cobbles still warm where the children had been sitting on them. Forty-odd people stood in the mud and the shade, with babies on their hips and bread in their hands and the Lowgate smell of wet stone and frying onions drifting over them from the kitchen’s back hatch. They had all been listening. They had been listening all week.
“Two days, by ours,” said Joss. “By the Hold’s count, which is the count that counts for the lodgers, since we are the ones who will have to be elsewhere when it runs out. The Bench counts from the nail, on the causeway, in its own clock. We count from the wall, where the nail went in, and the wall has been standing a great deal longer than the Bench has had its clock. So the Bench has five days and we have two. The Bench is very precise. We are not.”
