Her aunt is called Nell Reed and she is seventy-one and she has lived in the house at Cowl Street since 1780, which is to say since she was four.
She is the daughter of a woman from Harrowgate who was not from Harrowgate.
Tamsin went home from the Guild and told her in the kitchen at about six in the evening on the day of the eleven hundred marks.
She had it planned. She had four sentences in order and she had worked out the tone, because she has been managing that woman since she was nine years old and she knows exactly how it is done.
She got through about nine words.
"The Guild have offered me a — "
"No," said Nell Reed.
"Aunt — "
"You have come in with your face set and you have not taken your coat off and you have put your hands on the back of that chair," said Nell Reed, "and the last person who stood in this kitchen doing all three of those things was your father in the spring of the year ninety-nine.
"So no."
They had it out for about two hours.
There is no account of most of it and neither of them ever gave one, and the parts that are known are known because Tamsin Reed wrote four lines about it in the second book on the second night of the road.
She said: they are sending you because there is nobody to ask after you, and I am somebody, and I will come into that hall myself.
She said: I am seventy-one and I have buried a mother and a brother and I am not doing another one.
She said the thing about the chain.
The thing about the chain is this.
At about the fourth hour, when both of them were past shouting, Nell Reed went and stood in the corner of that kitchen where a sixty-six-foot chain has leaned since the spring of 1799, and put her hand on it.
"Seventeen years," she said. "Every Tuesday. I take it out to the yard and I run it and I oil the swivel and I bring it back in.
"And I have never once said out loud why."
"Aunt — "
"Because a chain goes rusty in a corner," said Nell Reed, "and a man cannot come back to a rusty chain, and I have been doing a stupid thing every Tuesday for seventeen years and I am too old to stop."
Tamsin Reed sat down at the table in her coat.
"I am going to find out what he was walking towards," she said.
"I know what you are going to do. I have known since you were about eleven."
There is one other thing in those four lines in the second book and it is the last of them.
She took the money.
The eleven hundred marks went to Cowl Street in the March, in full, before the road, sealed by Ferren himself and not the Guild — which was Tamsin's condition, and which Ferren did without being argued with, and which cost him something in that building that he has never itemised.
Nell Reed took it and said thank you and put it in the chest under the window.
And she did not spend one mark of it in the seven months her niece was gone.
It was all there in the November. Every coin, in the chest, under four pages in a hand nobody could read.