Wren had been given the witness’s chair because she had no vote, and because the Register wrote the Mantle’s Writ in a witness’s hand, and because the Chamber, which had argued about everything for two years and more, had at last agreed on one thing. A woman who had come up the causeway as Lodger One, in a marsh coat and a fever, and who was now Citizen Four and still had no vote, ought to be the one to see that the names were read right.
The chair was not a grand one. It was a plain bench-seat of ash with a back that had been carved, long ago, by someone with a knife and a grudge, and it stood at the lectern’s side, a half-step lower than the Chamber’s own seats, so that the witness could see the Roll’s lines and the reader’s mouth at the same time. Somebody had put a cushion on it. Wren suspected Pell. She did not take the cushion off.
She sat down the afternoon before the first sitting, with a clean ledger on her knee and a reed-pen in her hand, and she practised the words.
She had been taught the formula by Tallow, who had written it out for her in the Ink on a single sheet and had made her read it three times before he would let her sit down. It was a simple formula. A witness said what the Roll had said, and then said that she had…
