The Lowgate lodgers were short of a warm meal in the week the Charter was sealed, because the wool-loft had lost its best carder to the Thornwick road and the cooperage had lost two boys to the Fair’s ledger tent, and every household in the lane was living on barley and the last of the autumn cabbage. Pell heard it from the lodgers’ bench on the forty-ninth morning, when the wool-loft’s overseer came up to the Kitchen with a basket and a face like a funeral and asked, very humbly, whether the Kitchen had any pottage it could spare.
“Spare?” said Pell. She was at her board with the bread-knife in her good hand and flour to the elbow. “Dear, I’ve never spared a pot in my life. Sit down. You’re looking at my bread like it owes you money.”
They fed the lodgers in the Kitchen yard. Pell set two great pots on the trestle under the awning, and a third pot beside them, smaller and blacker, with a cloth tied over its lid. The first two were pottage. They were thick and brown and smelled of barley and cabbage and a little onion, which was all the Kitchen had left after the Fair’s second Turn. The third was the lie.
