Pell had been a cook for two hundred years, and not once in all that time had anybody sat her down and told her what her trade was paid.
She had not thought about it much. A cook did not think about her wage as a Chancery clerk thought about his salary, or a carter about his tally. A cook thought about the bread. She thought about whether the oven was true and the flour had weevils and the Hold’s children were eating enough green things to keep the scurvy off the Lowgate roofs. She had been thinking about all those things since the first morning she woke at the cold fire, with the stone floor under her feet and a voice in her head that sounded like a sergeant and a grandmother rolled into one, telling her the bread would not bake itself. She had never once asked what it had been worth. It had seemed a rude question, to a cook, the way asking a mother the price of her milk would be rude.
So when Tallow came up the stair that morning with the ledger under his arm and the look of a clerk who had been up all night, she put her flour-dusted hands on the Kitchen table and told him she wanted to see the Feed entries.
