Chapter 180

The year Dilly turned seventeen, the register of wards ran to nine volumes, and she could copy a page of it faster than I could.

I did not tell her so. She knew. She sat at the slanted desk from Ashgrove under the archive window, with a wedge of folded card under the short leg that I had put there the week it came and nobody had ever taken out, and she copied with her tongue between her teeth and her elbow out, and every so often she would stop and turn round on the stool and say, “Coldwater’s spelt Haverick two ways in the same column,” in a voice of deep personal injury, and I would come and look.

It was autumn. The riders were in from the far packs with the year’s returns. That was how it went now: every Midwinter the household books of forty-one packs came open onto a table in each pack’s hall, where any ward could walk up and ask to see her own line, and every autumn a copy of each came to Vaelmoor in a satchel, and another went west to the bottom of the olde