Meet the citizens

The people of Hollow

Four lives from The Ledger of Hollow. These notes are written for this website from the novel’s opening chapters; the Ledger’s public Register prints no names.

“A clerk contests everything.” “Only where evidence survives.”

Hesper and Mallow, Chapter 1

Mouse · Clerk at the Weighhouse

Mallow Fenn

Works: The Weighhouse
Lives: The Ninth Stair
Hopes for: The Archive

Mallow is a young mouse and a clerk at desk 6 on the Weighhouse’s mouse gallery, matching barge receipts against the scale. He wears black sleeve-guards at work, has a small notch in his left ear, and keeps a blue discrepancy book in his jacket pocket. Every error he finds goes into it, written small enough to leave the next line clean.

What matters to him

A figure put right. And the Archive: since he was eight, when his father took him up the Hoist to the Crown and he watched the Readers crossing the square, Mallow has wanted a place there. This autumn, his green envelope recommends exactly that.

Visit The Weighhouse Read the opening chapter

“All alike is a phrase used by animals who have never made two of anything.”

Tansy, Chapter 11

Vole · Glassblower at the Kilnworks

Tansy Moor

Works: The Kilnworks

Tansy works at a bench in the Kilnworks glasshouse in a leather apron, the jacks in one paw. Her left whiskers are shorter than her right, cut back by old heat. She is lively, frank and very funny about her own failures, and keeps a shelf of the bad pieces from her apprenticeship.

What matters to her

Making things with her own paws, and making her own choices about them. She and Mallow are close friends, and she is one of the few who will tell him plainly when he is being tiresome.

Visit The Kilnworks

“Two coppers. Each way.”

Agathe, Chapter 4

Badger · Keeper of the Lower Ferry

Agathe Brock

Works: The Lower Ferry
Lives: Lowbank

Agathe works the Lower Ferry, turning its hand-wheel in leather hauling-mitts with her hind paws planted wide. She is elderly, practical and sparing with words. She lives on the Lowbank side, in a tarred hut behind a fence of cabbages, with an unlit pipe on the windowsill.

What matters to her

The crossing. Lowbank animals rely on the raft to reach the Floor with their baskets and hand-carts, and Agathe keeps it going, season after season, whatever the river is doing.

Visit The Lower Ferry

“Coats take the same time whether their owners are sensible or impossible.”

Hesper, Chapter 1

Mouse · Tailor on the Ninth Stair

Hesper Fenn

Works: The Ninth Stair
Lives: The Ninth Stair

Mallow’s mother keeps a tailoring shop in the front room of the family’s rooms on the Ninth Stair, pins in her collar and a dark fall of cloth over the cutting table. Silver has spread through the fur of her muzzle this past year; her paws are as quick as ever.

What matters to her

Her family and her trade. Her own envelope this Quarter Day recommends she continue the shop and take an apprentice, and before breakfast is over she is planning Mallow a Reader’s coat in a good deep grey.

Visit The Ninth Stair Read the opening chapter