Piers kept his list on the wall of his room above the wool-loft, pinned at the corners with four brass tacks he had bought from a Lowgate ironmonger for a share and a half. It was a long sheet of good Coldharbour paper, foxed at the edges, and it had grown over the summer until it reached from the window-frame to the cold hearth. Every line on it was something he had built for somebody else.
A wool-barn with a sloping roof, Coldharbour, Mott & Lark’s own yard, for a factor who paid on the day.
A loom-house in the Thornwick market, for a weaver who died before the first beam was set.
A chapel bell-frame, Lessary side of the Ford, for a vicar who said it was too handsome for the parish and paid me double to keep it so.
A sluice on the Sallow for a salt-factor who never paid the mason, and whose name I will not write on a wall where my own hand can read it.
There were forty-one lines. He had counted them many times, in the spare hours of the Turn, when the wool-loft was quiet and the carders were gone home and the bales stood in their rows like sleeping cattle in the dim light. He did not count them for pride. He counted them the way other men said their prayers, to be sure that the thing he had been was still there to be counted, and that none of it…
