Vale did the sum he had been avoiding on the sixth morning after the frost came into the counting-house. He had known he would have to do it since the girl’s mother’s name had come back to him in the night. He had put it off for three days by counting other things: the frost on the glass, the candle-stubs in the drawer, the number of times his clerk had coughed into the cloth that morning, which was eleven. Now there was nothing left to count but the rent-slips, and he sat down in front of them with the census open at his left hand and a clean ledger at his right, and he began.
He set the parlour census beside the slips, row against row. He did it the way he had been taught to do it by his father, who had kept the parish rolls of the Thornwick high well for thirty years and had never once let a ledger go to bed with an empty column. A census was a list of names that answered to a lord. A rent-slip was a list of names that paid to a roof. Where the two lists agreed, a family existed in the parish. Where they did not agree, it did not, or it existed without permission, which in his father’s day had been called a trespass and in his own had been called a clerical error.
