Piers kept a list of everything he had built for other men. It ran to four pages in his own neat wool-factor’s hand, and he had been adding to it every night since the autumn his own hands had been handed back to him, by the light of a Lowgate lamp that smelt of tallow and was never quite bright enough.
The list was not a boast. He had tried very hard, over the winter, to make it a boast, because a man who had been lent into a Form twice over the years deserved at least one line that made him sound like somebody who had done something. But the list would not boast. It only recorded. A weighing-shed on the Coldharbour quay, for a factor named Pargeter, who had never once come to see it. A bridge over a creek, rented back to the builder by the year, because the creek’s owners had decided that a bridge they did not build was a bridge they could charge for. Two chapels, one in the rain and one in the sun. A Tollgate post designed in a single afternoon, for a toll that had taken his hands away. And a stone house on a hill above the Lessary road, whose roof he had not drawn, but whose walls he had laid with his own hands, stone by stone, for a Lessaran family who had never asked his name.
