For fifty-one years as a breathing man, and for every week since he woke up mortared into the west wall of a ruined hill fort, Noll Vey had hated the sound of an angry friend walking out of a room.
Whenever a mark walked out of a tent in Greyford or Bracken Ford, that was merely business; you packed the brass thimbles into the false bottom of the trunk and moved the wagon three miles down the river before the constable finished his porridge. When a friend walked out—when Hesta Quill slammed the lid of the wardrobe trunk because Noll had bet the winter coal-money on a three-legged mare, or when a stage carpenter threw down his hammer because the rent wasn’t what Noll had promised—Noll’s feet always started moving before his head caught up. He would follow them into the passage with his hat in his hands and three jokes already warm on his tongue, talking fast, promising half the next town’s gate receipts, turning his own shabbiness into a charming little farce until the other person sighed and laughed and let him off the hook.
His heavy right foot of grey limestone actually lifted half an inch off the flagstone to follow Fen toward the kitchen arch.
