Tessa Dene had grown up in Mere watching things get sold by the well.
When she was seven, she had stood behind her mother’s skirt near the horse trough and watched the March Ledger bailiffs auction off old Miller Ket’s bolting cloths and copper mash-tubs because the spring flood had taken his wheel before the tax quarter closed. When she was twelve, the year the grey dust in her father’s chest first turned his morning coughs the color of rusted nails, she had watched two sheep-reeves from the upper dales break three ash staves over each other’s shoulders beside the pump handle before Reeve Holt dumped a bucket of well-water over both their heads and fined them fourpence for wetting the cobbles. And every Martinmas fair, a blind piper from Greyford stood on the lower curb and played a tune about the Seven Founding Dukes that sounded like a pig caught under a gate.
The square knew how to look at misery, and it knew how to look at a brawl, and it knew how to look at a fraud with a painted cart.
It had no idea how to look at Noll Vey.
Tessa walked half a pace off Noll’s right limestone elbow as they crossed the last twenty feet of frost-slicked cobbles between the lane mouth and the well platform. She kept her chin up and her shoulders square under her patched wool jacket, her eyes sweeping the front benches the way Sella Rusk had taught her to…
