Here is what a surveyor does in Vennow, and it is worth setting down because everybody in this story is about to be extremely dramatic and none of it means anything unless you know what she was doing on the Tuesday before.
She measured ditches.
Seven years of it.
A man at Harrow Bank says the ditch is his and the ditch has moved. A man at Sallow says it has not. There is a deed from 1741 that says to the thorn and there has been no thorn since about 1780, and the two of them have not spoken in four years and their fathers did not speak either.
And somebody has to go out with a chain and a level and decide it.
She was extremely good at it.
That is not modesty in either direction: Tamsin Reed closed traverses on wet ground at six and twenty that men in that Guild could not close in a dry field, and she did it with a chain she made herself at nineteen because she could not afford a Guild one.
She did eleven of those disputes a year for seven years. Seventy-eight altogether. She has the book.
Sixty-nine of them were settled on her figures without going to law.
That is a number nobody in Vennow has ever quoted, and she has never quoted it either, and it is the reason four men in that town would have gone into a river for her and about ninety had no idea who she was.
The nine that went to law all went the same way.
A man would stand up in the Guild hall and say that the survey had been done by a woman.
And then — and this is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody who did not live there — everybody in the room would agree that this was not the point, and would be extremely fair about it, and would say so at some length.
And then they would appoint Aldous Pike to do it again.
She watched Pike fake a closure in the year she was four and twenty.
He ran a traverse at Cold Hollow that did not shut by four feet and he shut it in the book, in ink, in front of her, and when she said so he laughed and said, "Tam, it is a ditch."
She reported it.
There was an enquiry that lasted eleven minutes and Pike is still in that Guild and has a chair by the fire in it.
So when Ferren of the Guild said you are the best surveyor in four counties in a room in the March with a cup of something in front of her, she had been the best surveyor in four counties for about five years and had been told so in that building exactly once, by the man who was sending her down the Salt Road.
She has been asked, since — by four different people who came to look at eleven sheets in a case — whether she was angry.
"Everybody wants me to have been angry," she said to the fourth one, who was nineteen and who had walked from Harrowgate and who was not going to be put off.
"I was not angry, and I want to tell you why, because you have come a long way.
"A ditch is a real thing. It is out there in the ground whatever anybody in a hall says about it, and the chain does not care who is holding it, and in seven years I never once lost an argument with the ground.
"And if you can live with that," said Tamsin Reed, "you can live with almost anything for a while.
"But you should know that you are being trained. Every one of those seventy-eight jobs was teaching me to be somebody who does not need to be believed.
"And that is exactly the sort of person you send down the Salt Road."