Chapter 7: The Register and the Stamp

Magistrate Pell arrived on the sixth day of the count, younger than her and grayer than the season warranted, in the robe that had been made for a wider man and had won the argument in the end by outlasting the wider man's career. He carried the register in a case built for it, and the case had a lock on it that was not procedure, and nobody questioned the lock, because there is a class of man whose smallest irregularities are understood to have been earned. He did not give the case to porters. He did not set it down to shake her hand. He inclined to her, exactly, at the foot of the north court steps, and she inclined back, and the two of them stood a moment in the ruled light like a pair of instruments acknowledging calibration. "Magistrate Pell," she said. "Still Second Class?" "They considered advancement. I filed an objection." The register had grown a second volume. He confirmed the news from home as he did everything, which was by accuracy: the municipal roof had been re-slated at last; the quarter session would convene on schedule; the ford at the town bridge was running clear. Nothing sentimental crossed the account. Then, in the smaller voice, off any record, the measurer in him speaking to the measurer in her past the whole apparatus of both their lives: "The wall holds. I look at it when I pass. It holds." He did not mention Hale. She did not ask what the second volume held under the year's entries. The two courtesies carried them up the steps between them, load-bearing, like a plank over a hole. "The register is subpoenaed," he said, at the top, procedural again, "for the Marsh probate. The Court of Provisional Findings, tomorrow. I…