The copy of the old wage-form came to the quarry on the back of Mott’s rider’s horse, rolled inside a sleeve of oilcloth and tied with a thin green cord. The rider did not come up to the wall. He left the bundle at the quarry gate with the Thornwick clerk, who carried it up the path to the Form at dusk with his cough in his chest and his lantern swinging, and he set the oilcloth down at the foot of the new wall as carefully as if it had been a sleeping child.
“From the factor,” he said. “For the Form. She says it is the only paper in the Hold that is not about a debt.”
“She is wrong,” said Piers, through the grille. “It is about a debt. It is only a debt the Hold has not yet admitted.”
The clerk did not answer that. He looked up at the Form’s blank face in the lantern light, and then he looked at the grey sky above the Thornwick roofs, and then he went back down the path without another word, coughing.
Ebba read it. She had been waiting for it since the courier, and she had asked Piers twice that week whether the factor’s paper would come, and whether it would have the same wrong spelling as the Chancery’s schedule. Piers had said he did not know. He had only known that when it came, it would be read aloud, because there was nobody else in…
