Agnes Coombe's

The cook-shop stands on one of the broad, straight streets of Fleecegate, the wool quarter the trade laid out between about 4380 and 4450, three doors along from the Shears and the grading-hall door. Its age is not recorded. Victualler Agnes Coombe's slate is quoted from 4615, and by then her counter was already where a newcomer to the quarter came to be fed. The ground around it has known hard years: the Fleecegate Sickness of 4543 came out of the fulling yards behind these streets, and in the Water Days of 4551 some nine thousand people held the Fleecegate cistern.

It is a plain working kitchen, busiest at the hall workers' dinner hour and the commonest first meal for anyone new to the wool quarter. Coombe watches what a stranger orders, what he pays with and whether he keeps looking at the door while he eats, and she says that feeding a man once tells her more about him than his mother knows. Coin is the safe way to pay; anything else is noticed. From her door most strangers walk the three doors to the Shears, where the barmaid can say which beds in the quarter will take a man nobody has spoken for.

The usual day's round of Sarrum brings a visitor up London Road from Black Stone into Fleecegate to dine here or at the fivepenny Leg of Mutton in Hollowgate, and then on down Tenter Street, past the tenter frames, to the sheds of Scour Lane. Fleecegate wits claim Coombe can tell a Staplers' man from a Weavers' man by the way he holds his spoon.

Eat here first, pay in coin, keep your eyes off the door and be civil. What Coombe makes of a company tends to be known along the street before the company has finished its dinner.