Kessa climbed to the flour loft after the Kitchen had gone to bed, as she had done every night for a month, and sat down among the thirty sacks with the lamp in her lap and the bell in her coat, and she did not pretend that she was there to count.
The Kitchen below her was quiet. Pell had banked the ovens at the ninth bell and had sung the wheelwright’s song under her breath while she did it, very off-key, the way she always did when she had decided to say nothing and was determined to be heard saying it. Then the door of the proof-room had shut, and the scullery bolt had gone home, and the house had settled round its bread as a sleeping dog settles round a warm hearth. Kessa had listened to every sound of it. She knew them all. She had learned them as a thief learns a house, which was the way she had come to think of herself, and had not liked it, and had kept on.
The sacks sat round her in the dark like sleeping animals. They smelt of dust and old sweetness. Tallow’s tally had them at thirty. She had counted them herself each night, by lamplight, with her lips moving, and each night the count had come out at thirty, and each night the number had seemed a little more like a verdict.
