Pell baked for the Undercroft because a Chamber that sat to hear a reading of the lease would want bread after it, and she had never in her life believed in hunger for clauses. Hunger was for the Chancery, which fed its clerks on paper and wondered why they were thin. She had been up since the candle-clock with the flour and the crock of starter and the three big ovens in the Kitchen, and by the third bell the long table was lined with cloths and every cloth held a loaf, round and brown and cracked along the top the way the Mason’s Yard bread always cracked when the oven was too hot.
Ysra had come to the Kitchen door at the second bell to count the loaves before they left the ovens, because she counted everything that went up or down a stair, and she had stood on the threshold with her slate and her pencil and her eyes narrowed while Pell lifted the cloths one by one.
“Four short,” Ysra had said.
“They’re in the Chamber’s bellies,” said Pell. “Four of them, in advance. Tallow ate one at the sitting last night, and the Lowgate boys had two between them, and you had the heel of the one on the bench, which I saw you take when you thought I was looking at the ovens.”
