The Fair of Lodgers opened in the outer ward on the first bright morning of the autumn, and by the second bell the lane between the wool-loft and the cooperage was so full of carts that the gate-warden had stopped trying to count them. Harrow counted them anyway. He stood at the grain booth with the scale-beam on its trestle and the count-cord coiled in his coat, and every cart that went past was a number he could say aloud. So he said them.
“Eleven,” he said, as a handcart with a squealing axle rattled by the booth-pole. “Twelve. The axle is not one of them.”
“Nobody asked you about the axle,” said Pell from the next stall. She had set out two bins of flour and a board that read, in her round kitchen hand, SHARES OR SILVER, NOT CREDIT, DEAR. “You are meant to sell grain, Harrow. You are not meant to stand there being a kind of weather.”
“Weather is not counted,” said Harrow. “A stone is counted.”
Pell laughed, then coughed in the flour dust, then told a Lowgate woman that her flour was dearer than it looked. It was not dearer. Pell admitted this a line later, with a wink, which was the custom of her stall and the reason her stall was never quiet. Harrow did not laugh. He was looking at the beam. It was Pell’s beam from the river gate, lent to the Fair for the Turn, and it had a nick…
