Mott sat at the Thornwick counting-house table with the lamp turned low and the lord’s clerks at the far end of the room, pretending not to watch her, and she wrote the lending instrument as a private contract. It was to sit beside the Charter. It was not, she had explained to the clerks, a rival document, because no broker in Coldharbour would draft a rival to a Hold’s Charter in a lord’s own counting-house without first being hanged for it. It was a private paper, an honest one, of the sort a factor kept in her own box to be sure that a debt was not forgotten by the men who had agreed to it.
She had ridden out with the Form on the forty-third day, in the cart beside the copy, with her cloak buttoned to the throat and her cough quiet in her chest. She had watched the grey figure walk the Lessary Road from the river gate to the Ford, and the Ford to the causeway, and the causeway to Thornwick, with its stiff left hand held at its side and its face turned always toward the road ahead. She had not spoken to it. There had been nothing to say to a thing that did not answer. She had only watched its shoulders, and thought about the margin of her own draft, and about the way the phrase she had written there had grown in her hand over the last week, until it was no…
