The Charter’s season ended at the candle-clock, by the Charter’s own term, and nobody at Thornwick had thought to tell the Form.
Piers had known the day for a month. He had counted it on the wall-stones every evening with the copy’s left hand, one notch for each day the gang had gone home to its mothers and one for each day the Thornwick clerks had brought him a letter from the Hold saying that the lending stood. He had not told the gang the day. Ebba came up the quarry path every noon with her jug and her crutch, and she had walked home from the Hold two days before with a line in the lodgers’ ledger in her own name. She had come back on the third morning to tell him so, with her chin up and her mother’s cough still in her voice.
“They counted me,” she had said, at the foot of the wall. “The Hold. The whole of it. Nine of nine, and the lord of Thornwick read my name out loud, and I coughed on the stair.”
“I know,” said Piers. “The Form heard it through the clerk’s letter. It was very short. It said Ebba Crane, lodger, alive, and nothing else, and it was in Tallow’s hand.”
