Harrow had begun to sleep, and he did not like it.
He had told nobody except Teodor, who had thought it the most interesting thing a mason had ever admitted to him, and who had asked, with a boy’s total seriousness, whether the stones in the south wall ever slept too. Harrow had told him that stones did not sleep, because they had nothing to be tired from, and that a man who had been carrying the same count for two hundred years was entitled to a little rest in the dark if the Hold would let him take it. Teodor had written that down in his neat round hand, on the back of a Dovereach tally, and Harrow had not been able to tell whether the boy was mocking him or learning from him, which was the most unsettling thing a child had ever done to him.
So he slept in the stone house at the south corner, with the window open to the warm dark, and in the mornings the rain came in at the sill.
It did not always rain. Most mornings there was nothing but dew on the sill and a damp smell on the boards, and the early light lying flat and grey across the floor. But on some mornings the wind came round off the Caul in the night, and there was a fine soft spatter of water on the sill-wood, and a few drops ran down the inside of the frame and fell…
