Teodor went to see the new Dwelling because Harrow had said he could help hang the door, which was a joke, because Harrow had never hung a door in his life and the Mason’s trade did not believe in them.
It was a stone room on the south wall’s foot, with its back against the old footing and its front to the Mason’s Yard, and it had been built from the offcuts of the wall in less than a fortnight. Teodor had watched it go up. He had carried the lime for the mortar, and he had been told to stand well back when the big slabs came off the scaffold, and he had counted them under his breath as they went into their beds, because Harrow had insisted that a Dwelling was a count before it was a house. It had one window, small and square, with a shutter that did not quite close. It had a hearth of grey stone, not yet black with smoke, and a chair by the hearth that Harrow had made himself from a broken scaffold-board, and a count-cord hanging over the lintel above the door, where the door would have been if anybody had got round to it.
