The ledger tent stood at the far end of the outer ward, where the lane met the wall, and Tallow had pitched it there himself on the first morning of the Fair with two poles from the Mason’s Yard and a canvas that the Hold had used for a dye-vat cover before anyone had thought of a market. It had a trestle, a stool, a brass tray for coins, a box of slips, and a bottle of the Ink, which he kept corked. He sold receipts. He called them counted receipts, and he wrote every one of them in the colourless Ink, so that the sum could be read only when the slip was tilted into a particular light.
The lodgers found this infuriating. That was the point, Tallow thought, though he had not said so to anybody. A lodger who came to the tent for a receipt wanted the figure on the page, plain and dark, the way the Coldharbour factors wrote theirs. Tallow gave her the figure in a light she had to find for herself, by the tent door at noon, or by a candle held at the correct angle, and by the time she had found it she had also found that the Hold did not write its sums for people to skim. She came back. They always came back.
