جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 150

Ronan’s POVI have never been so useless in my life as I was for the next eleven minutes, and I’d not trade them for anything.“House of Carrow,” Wren said. “Witness or claim.”The man stood up. Sixty, good coat, the sort that keeps a hunter and never rides it.“Witness,” he said.“Say it to the girl with the pen.”“Witness.”Ade wrote it.“House of Thornhollow.”“Witness.”“House of Ranneck.”Nobody stood up.“Ranneck’s not sending,” the chairman said. “Their man’s in a tack room with two people on the door, as this woman’s already told the room.”“Then write Ranneck not present,” Wren said, “and write that the reason is in the second paragraph of my statement, and go on. House of Cawsand.”“Witness.”It went like that for nine of them, and I watched sixty men understand at about the same rate, which was not fast. Every one that said witness made it harder for the next to say anything else, and Wren had known that, and she had started with Carrow because Carrow is the biggest and the

Ronan's POVYou could see her from the top step. Grey hair pinned flat, sleeves down, she sat up beside the driver with her hands in her lap like a woman going to church."That's not possible," Wren said."It's a woman on a cart with Ranneck seals coming up Carrow Street.""She was in a harbour four days ago.""Four days is four days," Katrin said. "A boat came into Cawsand yesterday morning. You watched it come in yourself, and then you walked away up a kiln road with forty-one women and never once looked behind you, and I'd not have either."Wren went down two steps and stopped. I have seen that woman walk into a barn with nine men in it, and she did not stop, and she stopped on those steps with her hand on the rail."Ronan.""I'm here.""I've had nine years of her being dead and five months of her being a rumour and thirty days of a sleeve in a doorway." Her hands were shaking so badly she had to put the book under her arm to hide them. "If that's her, I'm going to say something un

Ronan’s POV“Sixty miles,” Sabe said. “Two hours down. Four horses and a spare.”“Then we go now.”“On what? There’s eleven of us, and we’ve walked from Cawsand.”“On four feet, up the river, and we don’t stop.” I was already getting my coat off. “Teilo, the ford at Nance is passable on a low tide, and the tide’s low at seven. Anybody who can’t do the ford goes round by the bridge and comes in behind us.”“Ronan.”“Not now, Wren.”“Ronan, listen to me for nine seconds.” She had hold of my sleeve,e and she is not a woman who takes hold of sleeves. “Four horses on a river road do thirty-five miles today and the rest tomorrow, because there’s no fording a horse at Nance in the dark and they’ll not risk the top road in this wind. You’ll be at my gate by four in the morning, and they’ll come up the lane at ten.”“Then we’ll be waiting.”“Then you’ll be eleven wolves who’ve run sixty miles on nothing, sat in a yard with ninety-one women in it, and he’ll come up that lane with four men and a

Ronan’s POVYou have never seen anything like ninety-one women being told something at five in the morning.Katrin does it with a bell. Wren did it with Cadoc’s yard rail and a voice that has been shouting at carts and chambers for eleven weeks, and it took her nine minutes.“Nobody hands anybody anything today,” she said. “Not a page, not a letter, not a bill, not a list. If a man comes to this gate and puts his hand out, you put both of yours behind your back like a carrier, and you come and find me.”“And if he’s got a paper?” one of the wash house women said.“Then he’s got a paper, and we’ve got ninety-one of you and eleven of them, and I’d rather explain myself to a magistrate than to any of you.”Then she got up on the mounting block.“There’s forty-one women come in on that cart,” she said, “and they were in a barn at Ranneck yesterday morning, and one of them’s been in it nine years. They’re released. It’s written in the register of this county,y and twenty-nine houses watche

Ronan’s POVI came off the hedge and over my own wall and into that yard with the mud still on me, and the chairman sat down at Cadoc’s bench and drank a cup of tea in front of eleven wolves and a hundred and thirty-two women like a man at a fair.“Thirteen,” Enid said. “Say where you got the number.”“Off a common fund ledger. Harbour dues.”“That’s a quarterly payment.”“It’s a quarterly payment to a boat master of two hundred and twenty coins,” he said, “and for the last two years it’s been two hundred and eighty, and I have queried the extra sixty at four quarter days and been told it was victualling, and it is not victualling, because I went and looked at the master’s own manifest in Cawsand in June.”Wren had the canvas roll on the bench before he finished the sentence.“This one?”He looked at it, and he went the colour of the wall.“How long have you had that?”“Since the thirty-first. A man read it to me by a lamp on a hill,l and then he walked back down to his boat.” She had