Pell asked them to come to the cupboard by the stair at the second bell, when the Kitchen had emptied of lodger-girls and the bread was cooling on its racks and the pottage had been taken off the fire. She did not say why. She sent the scullion round to the Gatehouse with a note in her round careless hand, the words spelt the way she spelt everything, which was phonetically and with great confidence, and the note said only: Tallow and the Watch, please, bring your counting. The cupboard. Pell.
Tallow read it twice on the stair. He thought the spelling of counting was the most honest thing he had read all week.
Ysra was already at the cupboard when he came down the last step. She was standing with her back to the Kitchen wall and her hands folded at her waist, and she had not lit a lamp, so that the only light in the room came from the high window and from the banked stove, which threw a red glow across the flagstones and up the grey-green paint of the cupboard door. She did not greet him. She counted him in with her eyes, the way she counted anyone who came through a door, and then she looked back at the cupboard.
