The Lantern Players performed The Lord Who Owned a House That Thought in the carriage-house on the twenty-fifth dusk, with nine lanterns hung in a line on iron hooks along the beam above the stage. Benedek Sly had insisted on nine. He said the stage required nine lights, and that he had taken the number from a sermon he had heard as a young man in a Lessary chapel, about nine lamps in a dark house and the sin of the one that burned cold. Idrin had heard the same sermon at court, from a chaplain who had been paid to preach it, and he did not argue with Sly about its arithmetic. He had come to the carriage-house out of a sense of duty, and found, to his surprise, that he was curious.
The room was full. The lodgers had come in their hundreds from the wool-loft and the cooperage, with their children on their shoulders and their coppers in their fists, and they sat on the bales and the benches and the flagstones at the front, where the chalk line marked the stage. Pell had brought a basket of sugared plums from the Kitchen and was eating them one at a time, with a look of enormous satisfaction, in the front row. Gaunt sat at the end of the second bench with his arms folded and his crooked hand tucked under one elbow, and he had already begun, in a voice that carried, to object to the stage.
