Nine Volumes

She kept the ledgers for fifty-one years.

There are thirty-nine of them and they are in a box at Fenny now, and the hand goes from a very fine copperplate in 1823 to something considerably rougher by 1868, and there are two gaps in it: eleven weeks in 1827, which is a childbirth, and four months in 1849, which is not and which is a thing that happened to her chest and which she never once wrote down anywhere.