The scale-house stood at the river gate, a squat stone box with a tin roof and a single wide door that opened onto the approach, so that anything that came up the hill had to be weighed in the sight of the whole Hold. Harrow had built it in the spring. He had put the beam in himself, a long oak arm with brass pans and an iron counterweight stamped with the Hold’s old mark, and he had said at the time that a scale which could not be seen from the wall was a scale that would be cheated by someone who had never once cheated in his life.
Pell stood beside it with her good hand on her hip and her stiff arm folded under her apron, and she watched the Coldharbour grain come up the approach one wagon at a time.
He had built the scale-house so that the Lowgate children could come up and watch it. They did. A row of them sat along the wall-top above the approach in the thin afternoon light, swinging their feet and counting the wagons aloud, and Pell could hear them from the beam, a ragged chorus of numbers that never once agreed with the gate-warden’s. She found the noise steadying. A kitchen was always loudest at the moment when the bread was most likely to fail, and the children were the only ones in the Hold who had not yet learned to be quiet about it.
