After

The justice room over the market hall at Ambry held about ninety people if they were willing to stand, and on the second Tuesday in April there were a hundred and ten in it, which told Nell all she needed to know about how the winter had gone.

She sat in the third row in a mended coat with her hat on her knee, because she was nobody: not a party, not a witness, not a licensed operator of any guild in England. Her name was on one sheet in the clerk’s bundle and she had not been asked to attend.

Magistrate Verel came in at ten and took eleven minutes to dispose of the whole of it.

The guild’s application for a compulsory order at Wexhall, made in the first week of November and adjourned that same month for the applicant to answer a matter arising on its own…