The Lowgate well-house had a roof of split shingles that let the frost through in grey dots, so that by the seventh week of the cold the lodgers who came to meet under it stood in a sort of speckled light, as though the sky were trying to read them through a sieve. Osk had stopped minding. He had stopped minding most things about the well-house, which was the wooden hut over the Lowgate well, with its rope-wheel and its bucket-chain and its bench along the north wall where the old women sat to gossip. It was the only building in the lodgers’ ward that had a door that shut properly, and that was why the lodgers met there.
There were forty of them on the first night, and by the second night there were more than sixty, and by the time Osk had finished reading the Chancery’s summons aloud the well-house was so full of breath and damp wool that the roof-dots had begun to steam.
He did not read it well. He had never read anything well. He had been a cooper’s journeyman in the marsh-towns before the Quiet Census struck them off the Lessaran rolls, and he had learned his letters from a tally-board and a barrel-maker’s chalk, and he read like a man lifting heavy staves: a line at a time, pausing to settle his grip. But he read every word, because the lodgers had asked him to, and because he had learned in the first…
