Tallow went down to the Undercroft with the minute-book under one arm and the bone-ledger in the other, because the Reading of Sella was set for the next sitting, and a clerk must read a dead woman’s score before he can enter it in the Roll. He had told himself that all morning, on the stairs, in the lamplight, the way he told himself the range of any figure before he trusted the figure. It did not make the steps any easier.
The Undercroft was cold. It was always cold, even in midsummer, because the stone of the Hold’s foundations had never once been warmed by the sun, and the air that came up from the lower vaults smelled of lime and old iron and something sweet and faint that the Mason’s Yard had never managed to scrub out. Three lamps had been set along the bone-table. Somebody had lit them for the Reading, and somebody had trimmed the wicks very carefully, and Tallow thought, with the part of his mind that noticed such things, that it had probably been Harrow, who could not bear a crooked flame.
The bone-table ran the length of the west wall. It was a long low slab of Foundation stone, scored at its edges with the old masons’ marks, and along its top, under their grey linen cloths, lay the Hold’s dead. Tallow did not look at them. He had learned in the first winter not to look at the cloths, because the shapes…
