Sect Year 5 · eleventh month · night of day 29 · the fifty-third life: Lowmere County, his thirty-eighth year
Hadley had been the county’s census-taker for eleven years, and he walked the dyke roads as though he had been born on them. He carried the roll under one arm, a satchel of ink and spare nibs across his back. The county stamp in his coat pocket, a plain brass thing with a crack in its handle that he had never had mended. The roads ran along the tops of the dykes with grey water on one side and reeds on the other. The wind came off the marsh all morning and never once grew warm. Birds went up out of the reeds in clattering handfuls whenever he came too near, and settled again behind him.
The roll for Sedge End gave two hundred and fourteen names. Hadley had most of them by heart. Before he set out he had read the page through twice at the dyke-head, and he had found the three lines at its foot where the land-mapper had written against them after the spring flood. Mabry Koss. Ilsa Marrin. Peto Hale. Each name had a short stroke beside it, and each stroke was followed by the same two words: to the river.
