The fifth sitting read fifty names and brought the Roll to four hundred and thirty, and Tallow read them himself, from the lectern, in the plain voice he had been trained to use for sums.
He had not wanted the task. The Chamber had given it to him by its usual method, which was that nobody had objected except Gaunt, who had objected to the lectern being too high for the clerk and then, when it was lowered, to the clerk being too short for the Roll. So Tallow stood on the step with his spectacles on and the Ink-pot at his elbow, and the Roll open at the four hundred and thirtieth line, and he read.
The names came out steadily. There was a cooper from the Lowgate row who had made the first barrels for the Kitchen’s salt, and who had been paid in salt, and had asked for nothing else. There was a girl called Joss Brent who had carried the Mason’s lime-buckets up the scaffold for two winters in the snow, and had fallen once, and had got up again without a word of complaint, and had died of a fever in her bed at the age of fourteen, which Tallow read as plainly as he could. There was a bridge-keeper’s widow from the Sallow Ford and a Lessaran deserter who had walked up the causeway in the first year and asked to be given a trade, and had been given the Forge’s bellows, and had…
