The Left-Handed Tally

About this book

In Harrowgate Ost, debts to the Crown are not written but cut: notched into hazel sticks and split in two, one half for the payer and one for the Exchequer. Ottilie Varr keeps four hundred thousand of those halves in a damp undercroft, where she was sent twenty-three years ago after forged tallies bearing her left-handed slant left the hill parishes to starve. Now the sticks are to be burned at the Feast of Settling, eleven days away. On the night the order goes up, an old porter dies at the foot of her stair and one foil disappears from her racks. Everyone believes she knows why. To clear her name she will have to read the grain of the sticks before the fire takes them, with an auditor who trusts no one, and face what she herself cut that winter.