The sitting was forty names, and Tallow had decided, the night before, that he would read none of them aloud himself if he could help it.
He had been reading for three days. His throat was raw from it. The Ink had gone thin in the jar and he had thinned it again with rainwater, so that the grey now came off the pen like a breath on cold glass, and the lines he wrote in the minute-book looked faded before they were dry. He had kept the range-marks in the margin with care, because a clerk who stopped troubling with his ranges had stopped troubling with the truth. But his hand had begun to shake a little at the wrist when he held the pen too long, and he had not told anybody, and he did not intend to.
So he sat at the minute-book with the Roll open in front of him and let the others speak.
Tobin read the first twenty. He did it from the lectern step in his clear high voice, and he was getting better at waiting for the Writ to fall. Mourner, who had not yet rested and would not rest until the last name had been sung, took the next ten from the awake seats in a low grave voice that made the Hall’s older Lowgate faces lift their heads. Tallow himself wrote each line as it came, and he marked each Writ in the margin with a short grey stroke, and…
