Tallow sat up with the winter accounts the way other men sat up with a sick child, because the figures would not sleep and somebody had to watch them. He had the gatehouse table to himself. On his left lay the Register, shut, its brass clasp catching the lamp. On his right, propped against the wall where he could read it without turning his head, stood the treasury slate, a long board of black oak on which the Hold’s stores were chalked in his own hand and rubbed out and chalked again every night at the candle-clock. He had kept the slate for two hundred years, or rather, he had kept it since he woke, and it had never once been wrong by more than a sack.
The grain stood at four hundred and seventy sacks. He wrote the figure at the head of the page, and beneath it he wrote the range he would have given if anyone had asked him for one, which was four hundred and sixty to four hundred and eighty, depending on how many sacks the damp had taken in the granary’s north corner since the morning count. The silver stood at one thousand nine hundred marks, in the iron-bound chest under the gatehouse stair, and that figure he wrote without a range, because silver did not go damp and no one had yet found a way to steal it without a key.
