Mireille laid Harrow’s cord along the gatehouse table in a long grey line, and she counted the knots with the Census open at her elbow and the struck page of Hollin Farm weighted flat beneath the lamp.
It took most of the morning. She did not hurry it. A cord of nine hundred and ninety-nine knots was not a thing that could be hurried by a Keeper who had been taught in Sallowmere to count a village’s ledger without once lifting her eyes from the column. She went along the cord with her gloved finger, one knot at a time, and at every twentieth knot she paused and touched the margin of the Census with her other hand, and wrote a small pencil figure on the inside of her cuff, where she could see it and nobody else could, because a cipher was only as good as the hand that kept its count.
The knots were tied close and the cord was old. Some of the knots had been retied so many times that their loops had worn to a dull smooth grey, and some of them were newer, in a cleaner grey, and she could see where Harrow’s blunt capitals had been pressed into the cord’s last inch in a long-ago winter, when he had not yet been able to tie a knot without saying the number aloud. At the end of the cord there was a single loose thread, a short blue end, where someone had once cut…
