We hear the bell before the Abbess speaks.
It is a small bronze handbell, the kind the Order carries down the roads in a leather case, and Hester Venn rings it in the Great Hall as though the Hall were a chapel that had been left out in the wind. We know the bell. We have known its note since the winter Brannoc was closed, when the Order’s teaching first came up the causeway with its grey habits and its quiet hands. She taught then that one mind to a body is a lamp, and that more than one is a door left open to the dark. We have heard her say it many times since. We have not answered it. A door is not a thing a body can argue with from the inside, and so we have listened, and kept our own counsel, and let the Hold go on counting.
She asks the Chamber’s leave to perform the rite of closing on the whole body. She asks it in the lodgers’ manner, under the Writ of the Great Hall, which lets her speak as a lodger and not as a citizen, and which allows her one site and no vote. The Great Hall is her site. Tallow allows it by his own minute, in the Ink, in the square hand that has kept our counts since the first winter. We do not object. We do not speak. We have not spoken in the Hall for a long season…
