Mott came into the Kitchen at the hour when the bread was out of the ovens and the pottage was simmering, which was the hour Pell liked least, because it was the hour when everybody wanted something and nobody had the grace to wait until the bread had cooled.
“Cook,” said Mott, from the door. She had a folded paper in one gloved hand and her other hand tucked into the fold of her coat, where Pell could see the shape of something flat and stiff. She had a cough. It was a dry, careful cough, the kind a factor uses to clear a throat before a sum, and it had got worse since the frost. “Would you be so kind as to tell me whether you keep a drawer?”
“I have no drawer,” said Pell.
She said it with her back turned. She was stirring the pottage, which needed stirring every breath or it would catch, and she kept stirring, and she said it again, louder, so that the two lodger girls scrubbing the bread-trays by the back door would hear it and carry it out into the yard, where it would do the most good. “I have no drawer, factor. I have never had one. A Kitchen Hand does not keep drawers. A Kitchen Hand keeps the pots, and the pots keep her.”
