Wren sold eels and baskets, because the marsh had taught her that a thing you could carry was a thing that could be sold twice. Her stall stood at the Lowgate end of the outer ward under a canvas roof she had stitched herself, the seams crooked, the patches mismatched, and every basket on the trestle was woven from the same grey reed her mother had cut on the Sallow’s edge before the Lessary men came with their survey-poles. The eels hung from a rope at the back of the stall in a row, smoked and dark and glossy, and they smelled of alder and salt, which was the smell of home to her, and which the Lowgate children held their noses against.
She was Lodger One. That was the thing the Hold had decided to do with her, long before the walls were mended. She was the first line in the lodgers’ ledger, in the Clerk’s own hand, and when the carters came up the Lessary Road and asked for the lodgers’ headman they were told to ask for the marsh girl first. She found it funny, and a little sad, in roughly equal parts. The Lowgate people treated her as a hostess. They sent her the difficult guests and the cheats and the people who did not know where the well was, and she took them all, and she charged them shares, and she did not once let them think she was grateful for the honour.
