Her father said the number to her once, in the January, in the hall at Kerrsyde, and it is the only time she ever heard him say it out loud.
"Forty-one."
"Faither — "
"Forty-one, Ailsa. Since the year five. I have had it written since the year fifteen and I put to it and I have never once taken anything off it."
He had it in a book.
That is the thing that nobody outside that family knows and that she found in 1529, four days after he died: a book, in his own hand, four inches by six, with forty-one entries in it and a date and a place against every one.
Twelve of ours.
Nineteen of theirs.
And ten that neither side will own and that are on both books, which is how you get forty-one out of thirty-one.
Her brother is number thirty-eight and there are four words after his name and the four words are at the ford, unknown.
She had kept the rentals since she was nineteen.
Her father's eyes went in the year twenty and there was nobody else — a son of nineteen who could not sit still and a steward who could not read a column — and so it was done at the end of a table by a girl in the evenings, and by the year twenty-three she had the whole of Kerrsyde in her head.
Sixty-four men of fighting age.
She had counted them in the December after Callum, because she could not sleep and she wanted a thing to do with her hands, and it took her four nights.
Sixty-four.
And then she did the other sum, which is the one nobody in that hall had said in nineteen years.
A hundred and ten in the year five.
Sixty-four now.
She wrote it on the last page of the rental book in the December of 1523, in small letters, and then scratched it out so hard that the paper went, and it is still there and you can still read it.
At this rate there is no Kerr in this valley by the year forty-eight.