Sefra had come through the culvert in the shape of a kitchen-woman, because the Watch would not stop a kitchen-woman with a lamp, and she had taken the shape off at the cistern’s grate as a wet coat is taken off in a doorway.
She did not miss it. She had worn so many shapes that the leaving of them had stopped being a loss and become a kind of housekeeping. The kitchen-woman had broad hands and a red face and a bundle of rags under one arm, and her hair had been pinned under a cloth that smelled of lard. Sefra had enjoyed being her for the length of the culvert. She had heard the Watch talk about the bread in front of her, and had said nothing, and had felt the great bland contempt that such people always feel for the one who carries the flour up the stair. It had been a good disguise. It had been a relief to be contemptible for once.
At the grate she had let it go. The lard-cloth had come off her head in the black water, and the broad hands had thinned into her own, and the red face had gone the grey of the cistern’s stone, which was her own grey, and she had sat down on the dry flags beyond the bend and put her back to the wall and her lamp in her lap.
