The Counting Floor

Nobody had asked them to. Nobody in Ferrow needed a door held, in the ordinary way of things; the Reading Room stood on Weigh Street between a chandler's and a man who mended clocks, and its narrow green door opened on to a pavement where nothing more dangerous than a carter's dray had ever come at anybody. But Bren had held doors for the family for sixty years, in the deep ribs and on the coast and on the dead stretch of the Pact Road with the wolves coming over the snow, and they had said, on the evening they arrived with their one bag and their guild coat folded over their arm, that they did not intend to stop now merely because the door in question was painted green and had a bell on it. So every morning, at the eighth bell, they came down the narrow stair from the little room at the back that had been a store for paper, very slowly, one step, then a rest, then another step, with their big hand on the rail, and crossed the front room past the long oak bench and the shelves, and unbarred the green door, and opened it, and stood in it.