The Ferrow Reading

The Reading Room opened at the eighth bell, as it always had, and on a morning in the middle of the hot of the year five hundred and forty it was Senna who opened it.

She came down the narrow stair from the room above the shelves slowly, one hand on the rail and the other on the wall, because her knees had views of their own about stairs and had been expressing them since the cool. At the foot she stopped and rested. Then she crossed the front room past the long oak bench and the shelves of readings books, and lifted the bar off the green door, and opened it, and stood on the step with the morning coming at her down Weigh Street.

It was a good morning. The air was soft. The carters were out already, and the dyers going down to the works with their blue arms bare, and the clock-mender next door had his shutters up and his little brass bell polished, and across the street the counting house stood in the early sun with all its windows shut, as it always stood, tall and pale and patient, like a clerk waiting to be told a figure. Nobody looked at her. Nobody had looked at the old woman on the Reading Room step for years, except to nod; she was as much a part of Weigh Street as the clock-mender's bell, and about as remarkable. She found that she liked it. It was restful. There had been a time when the whole of Ferrow had stopped in the street to watch what she would do next, and she had not liked that at all.