The Stone Yard

"The stone taught me more in a single morning than the courtroom had managed in a day. The courtroom told me what I was. The stone showed me what I wasn't."

The pickaxe came down.

I had expected a crack — the clean, decisive sound I had heard from the men at the centre, the experienced men whose blows fell with the authority of instruments perfectly matched to their purpose. What I got instead was a dull, blunt thud — the sound of iron meeting granite at an angle that was wrong in every particular, the force distributed across a surface too broad, the point of impact too shallow, the energy of the swing absorbed by the stone rather than transmitted through it. The vibration was immediate, savage, travelling up the ash shaft and through my wrists and into my forearms with a jolt that made my teeth clack together. My elbows locked, my shoulders seized, and for a moment I stood frozen in the aftermath of the blow, the pickaxe still pressed against the stone's surface, having accomplished precisely nothing.

The stone was unmarked. Not chipped, not cracked, not altered in any visible way. It sat upon the anvil with the same patient, indifferent solidity it had possessed before I struck it, and I understood — in my wrists, in my locked elbows, in the trembling muscles of my forearms — that the tool's weight and my willingness to swing it were not, by themselves, sufficient. Something else was required. Technique, perhaps. Understanding. The particular knowledge, earned through repetition and failure, of where a stone wished to break and how to persuade it.

I did not possess this knowledge. The stone knew it. The overseer had known it. And the man working two positions to my left knew it too, because he glanced up from his own work — a brief, sidelong assessment, lasting no more than a second — before returning his attention to the slab before him with the studied indifference of someone who has decided, for the present, that what he has seen is not his concern.

I raised the pickaxe again. My shoulders protested — a hot, pulling ache that ran from the base of my neck to the points of my shoulder blades, the muscles already complaining about a workload they had not agreed to and were not equipped to bear. I adjusted my grip, moving my hands further apart on the shaft the way I had seen the experienced men hold their hammers, and brought the tool down again.

Better. Not good — the angle was still wrong, the point of the pick striking the stone's surface rather than its edge — but the sound was sharper this time, a higher-pitched ring that suggested contact rather than mere collision. A flake of stone, no larger than a thumbnail, broke free and skittered across the anvil. I stared at it. It was a pitiful thing — a fragment so small it would not have filled the bowl of a teaspoon — but it was evidence. Evidence that the stone could be broken. Evidence that my body, however ill-suited to the task, could produce at least the rudiments of what was required.

I raised the pickaxe again. And again. And again.

The first quarter-hour was a negotiation between my body and the tool, conducted through the medium of the stone, and the stone was the only participant that did not suffer. Each swing taught me something — usually something about what not to do. Striking too high sent the vibration into my wrists with a force that left them aching for minutes afterwards. Striking too low glanced the pick off the stone's curved surface and drove the point into the dirt beside the anvil, requiring a wrenching effort to free it. Striking with the arms alone — which was what I was doing, I realised, compensating for my body's ignorance by throwing everything into the swing from the shoulders down — exhausted the muscles so rapidly that by the twentieth blow I could barely raise the tool above my waist.

I was doing it wrong. I knew I was doing it wrong. The men around me, even the newest of them, moved with an efficiency I could not replicate — a coordinated engagement of legs, hips, back, and arms that turned the whole body into a single mechanism, the force generated not by the arms alone but by the rotation of the trunk, the driving of the legs, the weight of the body falling forward into the stroke. I could see it. I could not do it. The seeing and the doing were separated by a gap that no amount of observation could close, and my body — trained for stillness, for sitting, for the careful, precise movements of pen and paper — refused to reorganise itself into the shape the work demanded.

By the end of the first half-hour, my hands were on fire.

The blisters had begun within the first ten minutes — small, hot points of friction at the base of each finger where the shaft's rough grain pressed and rubbed and pressed again with every stroke. I had felt them forming: a warmth that became a sting that became a burn that became, quite suddenly, a sharp, distinct pain — the skin separating from the flesh beneath, a pocket of fluid swelling between the two layers, tender and exposed and exquisitely sensitive to every subsequent contact with the wood. By the time I paused to look — shifting the pickaxe to my left hand and turning the right palm upward — the damage was plainly visible: three blisters across the base of my fingers, each one swollen and taut, the largest already split, the fluid inside weeping through a tear in the skin's surface and mixing with the grime on my palm to form a thin, pinkish smear.

I stared at them. They were obscene — not in their size, which was modest, but in what they represented. These were the hands that had copied Harrison's correspondence in a neat, careful script. These were the fingers that had turned the pages of the books I had bought, one at a time, from the stall on the High Street. These were the palms that had held Mother's hand at church and Father's handkerchief in the courtroom and the comb Culpepper had given me with a gruffness that concealed more kindness than it wished to admit. Now they were blistered, bleeding, burning, and the stone before me was barely chipped, and the morning was not yet half done.

"You'll want to wrap those."

The voice came from my left — the man who had glanced at me earlier, the one I had noted for the economy of his movements. He was not looking at me now. His attention was fixed on his own stone, his hammer rising and falling in a rhythm so steady and so measured that it seemed less like labour and more like breathing — an involuntary process that the body performed without the mind's active participation. He was wiry — slight across the shoulders, narrow through the waist, built from the kind of lean, fibrous muscle that carries no excess and wastes no energy. His face was thin, sharp-featured, the cheekbones prominent beneath skin that had been weathered to the colour and texture of old saddle leather. His age was difficult to determine — he might have been thirty-five or fifty-five, the gaol and the work having compressed whatever span of years he carried into a single, undifferentiated condition of endurance.

"Tear a strip from the bottom of your shirt," he continued, still not looking at me, his hammer maintaining its rhythm without pause or variation. "Wrap it around the worst ones. Tight. It'll hurt more before it hurts less, but you'll keep the skin on."

I hesitated. The advice was practical, useful, and unsolicited — three qualities that, in the gaol's economy, rarely appeared together without a price attached. Carver had taught me that. Don't trust anyone who offers you a deal too good to be true. But Carver's counsel had been about trades, about transactions, about the exchange of goods and favours in a system where nothing was given freely. This man was not offering a trade. He was offering information, and the distinction — however fine — felt important.

I tore a strip from my shirt's hem. The fabric parted reluctantly, the threads stretching and snapping in a ragged line that left the garment shorter and more disreputable than it already was. I wound the cloth around my right hand, pulling it tight across the blistered fingers, feeling the pressure of the binding against the raw skin beneath. The man was right — it hurt more, the fabric pressing the torn blister flat against the flesh, the friction of cloth against exposed skin producing a sharp, focused pain that made me draw breath through my teeth. But when I gripped the pickaxe again, the shaft no longer pressed directly against the wounds, and the reduction in agony was immediate and significant.

"Thank you," I said.

The man grunted. It was a sound that occupied the same territory as Carver's grunts — noncommittal, neither warm nor cold, a minimal expenditure of vocal energy that acknowledged the exchange without extending it. He continued to work. I continued to work. The conversation, such as it was, appeared to be over.

It was not over.

"You're swinging from the shoulders," he said, three or four minutes later, during which I had produced perhaps a handful of chips and fragments from a stone that seemed to regard my efforts with patient contempt. "That's why you're burning out. Man swings from the shoulders, he's got maybe an hour before his arms give. Man swings from the hips, he can go all day."

He did not demonstrate. He did not pause in his own work or turn to face me or offer any of the social niceties that, in the world I had come from, would have accompanied such instruction. He simply stated the fact and continued his rhythm, leaving me to extract from the statement whatever practical application I could manage.

I tried. I planted my feet wider, bent my knees slightly, and attempted to drive the next stroke from somewhere lower in my body — from the hips, as he had said, letting the rotation of my trunk carry the tool rather than hauling it with my arms. The first attempt was awkward, the coordination between my upper and lower body badly timed, the pickaxe arriving at the stone a fraction before my weight had settled into the blow. The result was a glancing strike that sent a judder up the shaft and accomplished nothing.

"Again," the man said. Not impatiently. Not encouragingly. Simply: again.

I tried again. And again. On the fourth attempt, something aligned — legs, hips, back, arms, all of them moving together in a sequence that was not yet fluid but was at least recognisable as the same motion I had watched the experienced men perform. The pick struck the stone at its edge, found a flaw I had not known was there, and a chunk the size of a walnut broke free with a sound that was — for the first time that morning — satisfying. Clean. The sound of a tool meeting stone the way it was designed to.

The man glanced at my work. His mouth moved in what was not a smile but was, perhaps, the absence of a frown. "Better," he said. The word was delivered with the same flat, factual tone he applied to everything, as though praise and criticism and observation were all the same category of information, undifferentiated by feeling. "Keep the weight forward. Don't lean back."

I kept the weight forward. I did not lean back. The next three strikes produced results — not impressive results, not the clean fractures the centre men achieved with every blow, but visible progress, the stone's surface yielding in small, grudging increments that accumulated, chip by chip, into something approaching a reduced mass. My hands burned. My shoulders ached. The muscles of my lower back, newly recruited to a task they had never performed, complained with a deep, structural pain that felt different from the surface agony of the blisters — a slower, heavier ache that promised not to worsen through the morning but to settle in and stay, taking up permanent residence in the architecture of my body like damp in the walls of an old house.

"Finch," the man said.

I looked at him. He was still working, still not looking at me, but the word had been directed at me — or rather, offered into the space between us, like a coin placed upon a counter.

"Name," he clarified, in case the offering had been too subtle. "Finch."

"Jeffries," I said.

"I know." Another grunt. Another strike of his hammer, another chip of stone sent skittering. "You're the clerk. Word gets round."

The statement carried no judgment, no mockery, no particular interest. It was inventory — the same process the overseer had performed with his eyes, the same process the gaol performed with all its inmates, sorting them into categories, assigning them values, filing them in the ledger of the institution's collective knowledge. Jeffries: clerk. Soft hands. New man. Seven years. The essential facts, compressed to their minimum, distributed through the population by whatever mechanism governed the transmission of information in a place where men were separated by stone but connected by the currents that ran through it like water through limestone.

"How long have you been here?" I asked, and immediately regretted the question — not because it was impolite but because it was unnecessary, the kind of conversational filler that belonged to drawing rooms and counting houses, not to a stone yard where every breath spent talking was a breath not spent working and the guards' eyes missed nothing.

Finch answered anyway. "Fourteen months. Awaiting transport, same as you." He paused — not in his work but in his speech, the hammer maintaining its rhythm while the words waited their turn. "Ship was supposed to come in November. Didn't. Supposed to come again in February. Didn't. Now they say summer, maybe. Maybe not. Nobody tells you the truth in here, so you stop asking and you break your stones and you wait."

Fourteen months. The number landed in me with a weight that had nothing to do with mathematics and everything to do with imagination. I had been here five days, and the five days had felt like a geological age — each one layered upon the last, compressed by the weight of the ones above, the hours solidifying into something dense and immovable. Fourteen months of this. Fourteen months of the bell, the bucket, the trough, the gruel, the stone. Fourteen months of waiting for a ship that did not come, of being told maybe and maybe not and nobody tells you the truth, of watching the calendar advance towards a departure that retreated at the same pace.

Finch had endured fourteen months and was still here, still working, still swinging his hammer with the measured, unhurried efficiency of a man who had found the pace he could sustain and would sustain it for as long as the gaol required. There was no bravery in it — he would not have called it bravery, and neither would I. There was only the continuation of a body that had learned what it needed to learn and did what it needed to do and asked for nothing from the process except its daily gruel and the absence of the lash.

I returned to my stone. The conversation subsided — not ended, exactly, but banked, like a fire reduced to embers that might be stirred again when conditions permitted. Finch worked. I worked. The yard's collective rhythm absorbed us both, the individual sounds of our tools blending into the continuous, irregular percussion that filled the air like the heartbeat of some vast, suffering organism.

The hours passed. I know they passed because the light changed — the pale grey of early morning warming, fractionally, to a slightly less pale grey, the sun somewhere above the cloud layer doing its diffident best to make its presence felt without actually committing to an appearance. The shadows on the yard's western wall shifted by imperceptible degrees, the line between shade and light creeping across the gravel with the slow, measured progress of a tide.

I did not watch the light. I watched the stone. I watched my hands, the wrappings darkening with sweat and blood and dust. I watched the chips accumulate — a slow, pitiful accretion that nonetheless represented, in the aggregate, the reduction of one stone to something approaching the required size. The overseer passed twice, pausing behind me each time with a silence that I felt between my shoulder blades like a blade laid flat against the skin. He said nothing. He did not need to. His presence was the comment, and the comment was: I am watching, and what I see is insufficient, but I will give you the morning before I make my judgment.

The experienced men at the centre worked on, oblivious or indifferent to the struggles at the margins. Their rhythms had long since settled into the deep, trance-like regularity of men whose bodies had surrendered to the work and whose minds had gone elsewhere — to memories, perhaps, or to fantasies, or to the particular blank, grey state that the gaol seemed to cultivate in those who had been within its walls long enough. They did not speak to one another. They did not look up. Their hammers rose and fell with the steady, impersonal rhythm of pistons in an engine, and the stone yielded to them with a regularity that bordered on the submissive, as though even the granite had learned that resistance was futile when the blows were properly placed.

Between the centre and the margins, a middle ground — men who were neither new nor old, neither expert nor incompetent, but somewhere in the long, grinding transition between the two. These were the men in whom the work was most visibly taking its toll: their movements slower than the centre men's but better formed than mine, their bodies carrying the evidence of weeks or months of adaptation in the thickening of their forearms, the callusing of their palms, the particular way they held their shoulders — slightly rounded, slightly forward, the posture of bodies that had reorganised themselves around the demands of a single, repeated motion.

I would become one of them. The thought arrived without invitation, a projection into a future I had not yet agreed to inhabit, and I felt the truth of it settle into me with the same slow, irreversible certainty as the ache settling into my back. My body would adapt. It would thicken where it needed to thicken, harden where it needed to harden, surrender whatever softness the counting house had permitted it to retain. The hands that held the pickaxe would become the hands the pickaxe required — calloused, rough, the blisters replaced by ridges of dead skin that no longer felt what they touched. The shoulders would broaden. The back would learn. And the man who emerged from the other end of this process would be a different man from the one who had entered it — stronger in his body, perhaps, but changed in ways that had nothing to do with strength and everything to do with what was lost in the gaining of it.

I did not want to think about what would be lost. I struck the stone instead.

A sound from the centre drew my attention — not the regular percussion of hammers but something sharper, briefer, a scuffle of boots on gravel followed by a voice raised in a tone I had not yet heard in the yard. Not a guard's bark. A prisoner's growl — low, territorial, carrying the unmistakable vibration of a boundary being communicated.

I looked up. Two men were standing in the centre section, their work abandoned, their tools hanging at their sides. One was large — heavy across the chest and shoulders, his shaved head gleaming with sweat despite the cold, his arms bare to the elbow where his sleeves had been torn or rolled to accommodate their bulk. The other was smaller, younger, his position adjacent to the larger man's, his stone encroaching — by no more than a foot, perhaps less — upon the territory the larger man considered his own.

The exchange was quiet. That was what made it menacing — the deliberate quietness of it, the way the larger man spoke without raising his voice, his words pitched for the ears of the smaller man alone, his body angled to block the nearest guard's line of sight. I could not hear what was said. I did not need to. The smaller man's reaction — the way his shoulders drew inward, the way his chin dropped, the way his hands tightened on his hammer not with the intention of using it but with the helpless, reflexive grip of a man who has been suddenly and comprehensively reminded of his place — told me everything.

The exchange lasted no more than ten seconds. The smaller man picked up his stone, moved it to a position further from the centre, and resumed work without a word. The larger man watched him go, his expression carrying nothing that could be called satisfied — satisfaction implied effort, and for him the encounter had required none. He returned to his hammer. The rhythm resumed. The yard continued as though nothing had happened.

But something had happened. A lesson had been delivered, and I was not the only student who had received it. Along the margins, I saw other men register the exchange and file it — the same quick, lateral glance, the same fractional adjustment of posture, the same silent recalibration of their understanding of how the yard worked and where, within its invisible architecture of power, they stood. The centre was not merely earned. It was defended. And the defence was conducted not through the overt mechanisms of guards and truncheons but through the subtler, older language of bodies in a confined space — a language of proximity and posture, of eye contact and its avoidance, of voices pitched below the threshold of official notice.

I understood it. Not because I had seen violence before — I had not, not really, not the kind that lived in the space between two men's bodies and did not require a blow to make its point — but because I recognised the structure. It was the same structure that governed Harrison's counting house, where the senior clerks occupied the desks nearest the window and the junior clerks took what was left, and where a man who reached above his station found his ink supply mysteriously reduced and his errors more publicly corrected. Different currency, different stakes, identical principle: space was power, and power was not shared.

The difference was that in the counting house, the worst consequence of a territorial miscalculation was a sharp word from Mr Harrison and a week of unpleasant assignments. Here, the consequences were written in a language I was still learning to read, and the punctuation marks were bruises.

Finch had watched the exchange too. When I glanced at him, he was already looking away, his hammer rising and falling with its customary steadiness, his expression revealing nothing. But after a moment — just long enough for the yard's attention to return to its work and the guards' eyes to resume their patrol — he spoke.

"That one's called Slade." His voice was barely above a murmur, the words delivered between strokes of the hammer, timed to the rhythm of the work so that they arrived as naturally as the sound of iron on stone. "Been here two years. Longer than anyone except the lifers. Runs the centre like it's his parlour. Nobody works his section without his say."

"And the other man?"

"New. Last week. Didn't know the rules." Finch's hammer fell. A chip flew. "He does now."

I absorbed this. The information was useful — more useful, in its way, than anything the chaplain had offered or the voices through the wall had counselled. Finch was not offering friendship. He was offering intelligence, and the distinction mattered because intelligence, unlike friendship, carried no expectation of reciprocity. He was telling me how the yard worked because a man who understood how the yard worked was less likely to cause a disruption that affected the men around him, including Finch. It was pragmatism, not generosity. The help was real, but the motive was self-interest, and the honesty of that — the clean, unvarnished transactionalism of it — was more trustworthy than any warmer offering could have been.

I filed Slade's name beside Carver's. I filed Finch's. The ledger in my mind was growing, its columns filling with the entries of a new economy — names, territories, hierarchies, rules. The clerk's habits, it seemed, survived the clerk's circumstances. The body might be breaking stone, but the mind was doing what it had always done: observing, categorising, reckoning the sums.

Whether this was adaptation or something else — something more calculating, more self-serving, something the counting house had cultivated and the gaol was now refining — I did not examine. There would be time for examination later. There was always time.

The hours continued. The sun did not appear. The cloud held its position — a low, uniform grey that turned the sky into a ceiling, pressing down upon the yard and its occupants with the same indifferent weight as the stone walls that enclosed them. The temperature neither rose nor fell. The air held its chill with the stubborn consistency of a season that had not yet decided to yield to its successor.

My body was failing. Not dramatically, not with the sudden collapse that Finch had predicted for men who swung too hard too fast, but incrementally, the way a structure fails when the load exceeds the design — one element at a time, each failure increasing the burden on the elements that remained. My hands were the first casualty, the blisters beneath the wrappings now a continuous, weeping burn that no amount of adjustment could relieve. My shoulders followed, the muscles shortening with each stroke, the range of motion contracting until I could barely raise the pickaxe above my waist. My lower back, which had begun the morning as a dull ache, had matured into a rigid, seizing pain that locked my spine into a curve from which straightening required a deliberate, teeth-clenching act of will.

The worst was the trembling. It began in my forearms — a fine, involuntary vibration that I could feel in the shaft of the pickaxe, a quiver that communicated my exhaustion to the tool and through the tool to the stone and through the stone to anyone who cared to observe. The experienced men did not tremble. Their arms were steady, their grips firm, their instruments extensions of bodies that had long since been remade in the image of the work. My arms trembled because they were still the arms of a clerk, asked to perform the duties of a labourer, and the gap between asking and achieving was measured in pain.

I did not stop. Not because I was brave — I was not brave, I was terrified, the fear of the guard's truncheon and the overseer's ledger-note and the unspecified consequences that Finch's tone had implied driving me forward with a force more potent than any discipline I could have summoned from within. I continued because stopping was not an option the yard extended, and the only alternative to continuing was collapse, and I was not ready — not yet, not on the first morning — to learn what collapse looked like in this place.

Finch, who had said little for the past hour, spoke again. "Water," he said, and inclined his head towards a bucket that stood at the end of the line, a wooden ladle hooked over its rim. "Take it when you need it. Don't ask. Don't wait for permission. If you pass out, they'll leave you where you fall until the bell."

I set down the pickaxe. The act of releasing the shaft was itself a small agony — my fingers had locked around the wood, the muscles of my hands cramped into a grip that required conscious effort to open, each finger uncurling separately, reluctantly, as though afraid of what the world would do to it once it let go. The wrappings on my right hand were soaked through — sweat, blood, and stone dust combined into a dark, gritty paste that clung to the cloth and pulled at the raw skin beneath.

I walked to the bucket. The distance was perhaps ten yards, but my legs moved with the stiff, uncertain gait of a man twice my age, the muscles of my thighs and calves protesting each step with a soreness that seemed disproportionate to the work they had been asked to do. Standing had been part of the labour — standing, crouching, bending, straightening — and the legs had borne the cost of each transition without complaint until the moment I asked them to walk, at which point they presented their account with interest.

The water in the bucket was not clean. It was grey, flecked with stone dust and the residue of the hands that had preceded mine, and the ladle was wet with the saliva of men I did not know. I drank from it anyway. The water was cold, metallic, faintly gritty, and it was the best thing I had tasted since Culpepper's bread and cheese five days ago. I drank two ladlefuls, feeling the cold spread through my chest and into my stomach, and for a moment — just a moment — the pain in my hands and my back and my shoulders receded to a manageable distance, held at bay by the simple, animal satisfaction of thirst quenched.

I returned to my position. The pickaxe was where I had left it, lying on the gravel beside the anvil stone, its iron head resting against the earth like a sleeping thing. I picked it up. The grip was agony — the wet wrappings offering even less protection than before, the blistered skin beneath screaming at the renewed contact — but I closed my hands around the shaft and raised it and brought it down.

The stone cracked.

Not completely. Not with the dramatic, theatrical fracture I had been imagining, the stone cleaving in two like a log beneath an axe. But a real crack — a visible line running from the point of impact to the stone's far edge, following a vein of quartz I had been unknowingly working towards all morning. The sound was different from any the stone had made before: not the dull thud of an ineffective blow or the sharp chip of a surface fragment, but a deeper, more resonant note — a tock, almost musical, that spoke of something fundamental shifting within the stone's structure.

I stared at it. The crack was thin, no wider than a hair, but it ran the stone's full width, and I knew — with the same instinct that had once told me when a column of figures was about to balance — that one more well-placed blow would split it.

I raised the pickaxe. I aimed for the crack's centre. I drove the stroke from my hips, the way Finch had shown me, letting the weight fall forward, keeping my arms as channels rather than engines.

The stone broke.

It fell apart along the crack's line, the two halves separating with a clean, dry sound and settling onto the anvil in a small cloud of dust. The fragments were roughly equal — two pieces where one had been, each one manageable, each one ready for the finer work that the hammers would perform. It was not skill. It was not talent. It was attrition — the dumb, persistent application of force to a weakness I had not known existed until it revealed itself.

Finch glanced at the result. He gave a single nod — barely a motion, more a fractional dip of the chin — and returned to his own work.

I reached for the next stone.

The bell came not long after — or perhaps it did; time in the yard had lost its ordinary properties, the hours neither crawling nor racing but simply existing in a suspended state where the only measure of duration was the body's progressive deterioration. The sound cut through the yard's percussion like a blade through cloth, sharp and clean, and the response was immediate: hammers fell, pickaxes were lowered, and the collective rhythm that had governed the morning ceased, all at once, as though a conductor had dropped his baton.

My arms stopped. They did not lower the pickaxe so much as release it — the muscles unlocking, the fingers opening, the tool dropping to the gravel beside my feet with a thunk that I felt in the soles of my boots. The sudden absence of the tool's weight was itself a sensation — a lightness in my hands and arms that felt wrong, unbalanced, as though my body had already begun to recalibrate itself around the pickaxe's heft and could not yet remember what it felt like to carry nothing.

I stood. The yard was emptying, the men setting down their tools and straightening with the slow, careful movements of bodies returning from a long distance. Backs unfolded. Shoulders rolled. Hands opened and closed, the fingers working to release cramps that had set in hours ago and been ignored until this moment.

My own hands hung at my sides, the wrappings dark and sodden, the fingers curled into loose fists that I could not fully straighten. My back was a single, continuous ache from the base of my skull to my hips. My legs trembled. My shirt was damp with sweat despite the cold, clinging to my back and chest, and the stone dust had settled into every fold and crease — my hair, my collar, the creases of my elbows, the spaces between my fingers — coating me in a fine, pale film that turned my dark clothing grey and my skin the colour of the walls.

Finch set down his hammer, rolled his shoulders once with the practise of a man who had learned exactly which movements relieved which aches, and stood.

"Lunch," he said, jerking his chin towards the yard's far gate. "Come on, before the bread's gone."