The Mason’s copy came home up the Lessary Road on a Thornwick cart, lying on its back in a bed of straw with its arms folded across its chest and its blank face turned to the sky. Piers walked at the cart’s near wheel the whole of the way. He would not let the carters take it. He had said so at the quarry gate in the dark, in a voice that the carters had not argued with, and he had walked beside the wheel through the frost and the long grey morning and the bridge at the Ruined Bridge, where the cart had stopped and the carter’s boy had got down to water the horse, and Piers had put his own hand on the copy’s shoulder through the straw and had not moved until the horse was back in its traces.
Harrow saw the cart come up the inner road at the third hour after dawn. He was in the Mason’s Yard with the count-cord round his wrist and the trough at his back, and he had been counting the stones of the yard’s north wall since first light, because it was a thing he did when he could not sit still, and because the frost had got into the joints during the night and he wanted to be certain that nothing had shifted. He heard the wheels on the cobbles before he saw them. He knew the sound. It was the note of a cart carrying a load…
