The Ink was running low, and Tallow had decided that it would last the afternoon if he thinned it with rainwater and did not write anything he would later regret.
He sat at the minute-book at the foot of the Great Hall’s table with the jar at his elbow and the lamp, though it was not yet needed, trimmed to a steady flame. The room smelled of warm stone and bread. The shutters were open to the summer. From the yard came the thump of the Hard Hands’ drill and, very faintly, the bleat of a goat that had been told to leave the kitchen step and had not yet decided to obey.
Across the table the Crown’s envoy had spread her papers in an order he could not fault. The Writ of Property lay at the top, sealed in Lessary’s green wax. Beneath it was a copy of the Chancery’s book, the page where the Crown kept its oldest claims, and beneath that a sheet of plain paper on which she had copied, in her own small hand, a single line. She had copied it three times, he noticed. The third copy had a word struck through and rewritten, which was the sort of thing a clerk did when he had decided that the first two were correct and had then been unable to stop himself.
