Harrow walked out to the Lowgate south wall on the thirty-fourth morning, before the first bell, because he had heard from the boy at the Gatehouse that the copy had been laying stone in the rain for four days and had not once come in to dry. He did not like to hear of a Form working without someone to see it. He went down the lane between the cooperage and the wool-loft with his count-cord in one hand and his hood pulled forward, and he counted his steps as he went, forty-one from the cooperage gate to the wall-foot, and then forty-one back, to be sure that the lane had not moved in the night.
The south wall stood at the bottom of the Lowgate lane where the ground fell toward the marsh, and it was the newest stretch of the Hold’s outer work. Harrow had laid its footings himself in the spring, in a cold wet week with a bad cough in his chest, and he had not been pleased with them. The wall had been built to hold the lane’s cottages off the reed-bank. It had not been built to be pulled down and rebuilt by a Form in the middle of an autumn, one course at a time, by a copy that had been cast from his own trade and sent out to labour under a Charter for a season.
