The chapel bell had been melted under the Charter of the Bells, in the second year of the Hold, when the body was hungry and the Chancery’s iron had stopped coming up the Lessary road. Gaunt had objected to that at the time, in the Forge, to anybody who would stand still for it. He had objected to the Charter’s Tithe-mark, which had been stamped on the crock’s lid in a hand so careless the figure came out crooked, and to the Chancery’s clerk who had signed it, and to the Forge’s own apprentices, who had carried the bell’s metal down to the store-room with their faces turned away, as if it were a dead man they had been ordered to bury.
The metal had sat in the store-room for three years since. It lay in a clay-lined crock with the Charter’s mark on the lid, and every morning Gaunt went down and lifted the lid and looked at it and put the lid back, and objected to the mark, and went up again. He had never once touched the metal itself. It was not his to touch until the Ink said so.
The Ink had said so at the midsummer sitting. It had said that the bell was to be recast from its own iron, on the last day of the Reading, and that the Smith would cast it, because the Smith had been the one to melt it, under protest, and the Chamber had a sense of humour…
