Ren woke to a street that had gone quiet in the night, and he knew the snow before he saw it.
Snow took the street's sounds and held them. No cart rolled. No early voice called. Only the tea stall's kettle sang across the street, small under the hush.
He lifted the shutter. The street lay white from wall to wall. The roofs were white. The gate sheds wore white shoulders. On the shop's own step, the snow stood unmarked, up to the door's lower edge.
The first snow had come in the night, the way the winter always came to that street: without asking, and all at once.
Ren swept the step clear with the yard broom and scattered ash on the stones, the way his grandmother had done, so the day's feet would not slide at his door. The well keeper's boy went past with his buckets empty and came back with them full, walking in his own first tracks. At the sheds, a man was fitting runners to a cart, kneeling in the snow, swearing softly at the cold in his fingers. The street was learning its winter shape again, one errand at a time.
At the stall, Toma coughed, and coughed again, and beat his chest once with a small fist, offended at it.
"Drink your tea hot," Ren said. "Slowly. It is the cold in your chest. That is all it is — for now."
"A cough is a cough," the boy said. And he coughed again, as if to prove the thing belonged to him.
By the second day, the coughs had spread the way news spread in that street: from door to door, with no one seen carrying them. A cough at the sheds. A cough in the yard. A cough behind a shutter, answered by another cough behind the next shutter.
On the third morning, the shed man's wife came to the counter with her shawl over her mouth, and the heat stood in her face before she spoke.
"How long has the heat been on you?" Ren said.
"Since the snow," she said. "It does not lift in the day. It is worse in the night."
He took down the first jar of the reserve off the high shelf. The seal was his own wax, poured in the autumn evenings, with his mark in it. He set the jar on the counter and read its label aloud, the way labels were read in that shop: the name, the drying week, the mark.
"This is a cure of three days," he said. "One measure at morning, one at night, in hot water. The heat should break inside the three days. If it does not break, or if the breath shortens, you come back to this counter, or you send. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you," she said.
"Three hundred," he said. "The price on the board. It is the same price it was in the autumn."
She counted the coins out of her sash onto the wood. He counted them off the wood into the till. Then he wrote her name in the day book, against the first jar of the winter, in the place where the reserve stood.
One hundred and nineteen.
The jars began to come down the way the snow had come: a few the first day, and then steadily. A carter's mother, grey with the heat. A yard man's boy, coughing in his father's arms, too hot to stand straight. The keeper of the lower well, who had not left her house in two days and sent her sister with the coins wrapped in cloth.
Ren broke no seal in a hurry, though the counter filled. Each jar was read aloud. Each name went into the book. A seal read wrong in a hurry was a jar wasted, and a jar wasted was a house unhelped.
The well keeper's sister came on the fourth day, with the coins knotted into a cloth, and her news said before the cloth was open.
"She has not left the house in two days. The heat stands on her in the night. She sent me because her hands shake too much for the knots."
Ren took the jar down and read the label to her, and said the words that went with every jar, the same words, in the same order.
"One measure at morning, one at night, in hot water. Three days. The heat should break inside the three days. If it does not break, or if her breath shortens, you come back to this counter — you, yourself, not a neighbour. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you," the sister said.
"Three hundred. It is the price on the board."
She untied the cloth with her teeth and counted the coins out of it onto the wood, slowly, the way money is counted when it has been saved for one thing. He counted them off the wood into the till, and wrote the well keeper's name in the book, and the sister's under it, as the hand that had carried it.
On the week's third evening, Ren went into the back room with the lamp and walked the rows the way he had walked them since the drying: shelf by shelf, with his eye on the seals. The cold had come into the room and stood there, dry and still. The wax on the jars had hardened to a dull shine. A hard frost on the roofs, and down by the river the flats would be iron — but in here the seals held their shape, and the labels stood straight, and nothing sweated, and nothing wept. The low shelf stood empty under the rows, the way the rule had kept it since the autumn, and the rows above it stood full.
At the week's end, he counted the reserve the way the reserve was counted: by the shelves, in the lamplight, with Toma reading the rows back to him off the book.
"Fourteen cures out," the boy said. "In the first week."
"Fourteen," Ren said. "Write it under the names."
Fourteen cures sold in the first week of the snow. One hundred and six standing.
That same night, with the shutter down, Ren closed the autumn's pages. He added the season up in kinds, aloud, with the lamp at his elbow — sums in that shop were spoken, so a page could be argued with while its ink was still wet.
"Leaf sold by weight, for winter shelves up and down the street: two thousand, one hundred and forty. Salve, at the board's price: one thousand, six hundred. Powder sachets: nine hundred and sixty. Roots: one thousand, one hundred."
He set the pen down and looked at the column a while.
"The autumn's till: five thousand, eight hundred."
Then the first week's cures, counted under their names on the winter page: fourteen jars at the board's price — four thousand, two hundred.
"Five thousand, eight hundred, and four thousand, two hundred," he said, to the empty shop. "Ten thousand."
On the winter page, under his own hand from the summer, the order of the paying stood written: six thousand, and six thousand, and eight thousand at the thin month, and the rest as the winter gave it.
The winter was giving it. Slowly, in small coins and broken seals — but it was giving it.
The month turned, and the agent came with it: snow on his shoulders, the strongbox at his hip, stamping the cold off his boots at the door.
The stall sent his tea over, the way it always did. He drank it with his eyes on the high shelf, the way a man looks at a field he has seen at another season.
"The jars are going down," he said.
"The street is coughing," Ren said. "They were dried against the coughing."
The agent set the strongbox on the floor by his boot, the way a man sets down a thing he means to lift full.
"The carrying first," he said. It crossed in small stacks, and he nodded at each one as it passed, the way a man counts fence posts from a cart.
Then the ten thousand stood on the counter in its kinds, and Ren named the parts as they went over — in that shop, money was named as it crossed.
"Five thousand, eight hundred: the autumn's till. Four thousand, two hundred: the first week's cures, fourteen jars off the reserve."
The agent lifted the last stack in and shut the lid on the whole of it. In his book, at the winter page, beneath the thin month's entry, his square hand wrote the new line.
Paid at the winter's turn: ten thousand. Balance: forty-two thousand.
He blotted the line and set his seal beside it, and turned the book a quarter circle toward Ren. Ren wrote the same words into the day book, under his own hand, and signed.
That night, at the head of the winter page, Ren wrote the count large, the way a man writes the thing he wants found first.
One hundred and six standing. The number: forty-two thousand. Ahead of this page: the solstice, the street's coughs, and the seals holding.
Outside, under the snow's hush, a cough sounded in the street, and another answered it from two doors down.
Fourteen jars were gone. The coughs were only beginning.