Tamsin had eleven new kids to count, and a ledger that would not hold them.
It was not the ledger’s fault. It was a good book, bound in Lowgate calfskin by the saddler’s widow, with a column for each pen and a column for each birth and a column at the far right for the name the kid would answer to. But the kids had been born in the thaw, in three separate pens, to three separate nannies, and two of them had been born in the night, and one of them had been born in the milk-trough, which Tamsin had not known was possible until she saw it. She had written eleven, and then crossed out one, and then written it again, because the grey one with the crooked ear had been standing in the trough at the time of its birth and she could not in conscience have it counted under the wrong pen.
“Eleven,” she said aloud, to the lodgers’ headman, who was walking beside her with the lodgers’ book under his arm and a look of patient interest on his face. “Four in the long pen, three in the new pen, and four in the trough, which is a pen that does not know it is one yet.”
