The cloister garth is a square of green with a well in the middle that does not care about vaults except that mortar needs water and so do masons.

You crank a bucket. It arrives honest. The almonry door on the west walk is open: bread for the day’s poor, a leftover logic of the place. A cathedral is a prayer with a kitchen attached, and a jobsite with a saint’s name on the west front.

Canon Odo drinks nothing, watches the bucket.

“Siege and Thursday,” you say, because someone in a keep once said a well is both, and it is true here too. “Mortar. Mouths. Washing grit off a cut. If the well failed, the choir would fail without anyone being wicked.”

Peverel writes well-rope, new on a line because he is that sort of clerk and you like him for it.

Rain ticks the cloister roof. Chapter house door: stone benches in an octagon, where the canons sit and decide whether a feast is allowed to bully a gale.

The centering still has to be understood. So does Odo’s deadline.

Alms at the door are bread, not a sermon you have to applaud. A woman takes a loaf and a look at the scaffolding and says, “Don’t fall,” which is the town’s liturgy. The well-rope is hairy and honest. Odo watches as if watching were a kind of prayer that might pay for timber.