The new school was going up at the lime yard end of the town, and it wanted a bell of its own. The Cloth Hall already had a school bell, four hundredweight, rung for the school and the curfew, and the town decided, as towns do, that one bell cannot do two jobs. So they cast one.

Tamsin Lowe cut the flaw on the long bench, in wet sand, with a knife her father had sharpened before he died. The mould lay open in front of her like a big brown flower. At the place where a flaw has to go she had cut a soft curl, no longer than her thumb, that would let a voice carry out across a wet yard and stop when it had finished saying the thing.

Sand was in her eyebrows, and there was a sand-cake burn on the inside of her right wrist where the damp sand and the hot bench met every day of her life, shaped like a crescent, which did not hurt any more. A soft curl, she thought. That is interesting.

That was the trouble with her. The town wanted a bell that would call the children in out of the rain. She wanted to cut a curl. If the truth is told she would have cut it anyway and then found the reason afterwards, and nothing had gone wrong yet, which was the dangerous part.

The pour was on the Thursday. The water tanks were filled, because a mould cannot survive a bad hour. The shed was the colour of the inside of a teapot: orange light off the furnace mouth lying flat across the black timber, and at the far end, where the door stood open, cold blue daylight with the rain coming through it in grey lines. Everyone stood on the stair landing, the only place in the building where you could see the mould and stay out of the splash path. “The metal is out,” said Nan Ilva.

The ladle came up the chain on two gangers’ arms, the size of a bathtub, and the noise of the shed went out like a lamp. Then the metal came out of it, one hundred and forty seconds of it, and the steam went up past the landing. Then, in that moment, the bench speaks the flaw. That is the custom, and it is older than the foundry: the moulder whose bench it is says out loud what the bell is going to do, and the metal hears it and takes it.

She had never once had to say the wrong thing. She opened her mouth, and what came out was not what she had cut. “A seam in the shoulder,” she said. “Three inches. Just a seam, so it will carry.”

Four seconds later the metal had stopped running, the pit was hissing, and the door at the top of the stair had been shut. Nan Ilva came down the landing with her sleeves pushed down over the white crescents on her arms. “Twelve hundred and falling,” she said, to nobody. “Twelve hundred and falling, and the pit is shut, and somebody has lost a good day’s work.” And then, in a completely different voice: “What did you say to it?” “I said a seam in the shoulder. Three inches, so it will carry.”

Nan Ilva stood still on the landing in the steam while people shouted about the sand and the water and the hundredweight of ruined bronze. “You did not plan that,” said Nan Ilva. “No,” said Tamsin. “Then that is the only good news in this building, and I am not having anybody in my shed say the word chosen about it. It happens about one casting in nine. You do not decide what the metal wants. You describe it fast, before it decides for itself.” “Yes, Nan.”

They broke the mould out of the sand nine days later, and the bell came up with sand all down its sides, and Tamsin knew what was on it before anybody had scraped a thing off. Down in the shoulder, three inches of it, was a line of dull red where the metal had not closed over. A seam. Not her curl. Her curl was up at the lip where she cut it, exactly as she left it, and the seam was in the place that screams.

Moulder Sennen came and looked at it for a long time. He had been a moulder for thirty-one years, said not one word, and went and got a file. “Leave it open,” he said. “I have never filed a seam over in my life, and neither has anybody in this town.”

They stripped the crown back, dressed the bell and hung it in a frame in the shed to try it, because a bell in a yard is a heap of bronze. Ebba Roke was sent for, because she was the youngest hand on the ropes and this was a bell at the end of a rope, not a fire. She got the wheel over twice before she was satisfied. Then the bell went off, and it did not sound like a bell.

It screamed. It was not loud, it was arriving: it got into the chest before it got into the ears, the way the fire bell does, and it said the same thing an hour before the thing it was saying. Every person in the Long Shed put a hand on the bench. Verity Ash came down off her ladder with her waxed notebook on its lanyard and put two fingers flat on the window frame while she listened, the way she does before she will say a number. “Eighty paces,” she said, “give or take the hiss. It arrives before it leaves.”

After that it was the book. Because a flaw that has been named aloud to somebody who believes it, and written down, is what that bell is for the rest of its life. It cannot be renamed, and the year somebody tries, everybody in the valley knows inside a week, and nobody can afterwards remember exactly what they heard. Only that it was wrong.

And the other thing was worse. If the book wrote this bell down as a defect, the book was finished with it, and a bell the book has finished with does not stop. It goes on doing precisely what it was always going to do, in a schoolyard, at eight in the morning, for a hundred years. Aldous Crenn had the leather book open on its lectern at the north window, the green brass reading arm over his shoulder, and the lamp throwing its light across nine hundred years of hands.

“The book says, in the hand of Ferrow—” he said, and stopped. He waited. He always waited, and the sentence never finished itself, because there is no line in that book for what happened on Thursday. “Mr Crenn,” said Nan Ilva. “Is there a word for it.”

“There is a word for the moulder who cuts a seam. There is a word for the founder who runs a cold pour. There is a word for a bell with a flaw in it.” Aldous turned his good eye away from the page and read around the yellow one instead. “There is no word in this book for a bell that was not the bell anybody meant.”

Tamsin went up to the counting house on the Sunday, because she could not sleep. Aldous was there with his coat on, as he always is with the book. She stood by the lectern and looked at the ruled lines and said nothing for a long time. “So which is it meant to be?” she said at last, and then waited through the silence, which is what she always does.

Moulder Sennen came in behind her with his hat in his hand. “I am not going to say this is advice, but,” he said, “do not say you gave it unless you are prepared to say it in front of the whole town and be the one it stays with. It is not a punishment. It is worse. It is a name that follows you to the next bell.” “I did give it,” said Tamsin. “I said it out loud. I said it before I knew what it was.”

“I know you did. I am not asking what happened. I am asking who is going to put their name under it.” And Sennen pulled the chair out, sat down, and asked Aldous for the pen. Aldous gave him the pen and would not give him the book. Sennen wrote on a separate sheet, in his own square hand that leaned right and spelled foundry wrong, and read it out before he gave it over.

“Cast for the new school at the lime yard. Flaw, a seam in the shoulder, three inches, spoken at the pour and not cut at the bench. For the fire. I did not cut it. I stood at that bench and I let the bench be, and that is my hand and my fault, and I set my name to it, J. Sennen, moulder.” Then he said, “Right,” and was quiet for a while. “That is not true,” said Tamsin. “You did not let anything be. I was at that bench.”

“No,” said Sennen. “And I am not going to write down a thing that is not true, and neither are you, and that is the whole trade.” He turned the sheet round for her. “But I was the moulder on the floor that day, and I let a girl who is not finished be out alone at that bench. That is a thing I chose. I can put my name to it, and it will be true.”

So the book got a line, and the line has Sennen’s name at the end of it, and what it says is that the new school’s bell is a fire bell. The bell hangs now in a small belfry on the new school and screams an hour early, and Mrs. Dall at the Two Wells has stopped sleeping badly, because the fire everybody was putting out on her roof in the spring was put out an hour before it began. But the school has no bell.

The schoolmistress read the hours out loud instead. She did it badly, and the children were quiet and let her, and after a while they stopped needing her, because they kept the hour by the sun crossing the classroom window, which is what her mother’s children had done. And Tamsin was not sent away from the bench, and she was not praised either. She was given the next mould, and the bench, and the knife.

The second pour was six weeks later, in the first snow. Tamsin cut that flaw herself, in wet sand, with her father’s knife. She cut a soft curl at the lip, no longer than her thumb, that would let a voice carry out across a wet yard and stop when it had finished saying the thing. Nothing else. No seam and no scream and nothing for anybody to be frightened of at eight in the morning.

She stood over the mould with the sand in her eyebrows and the crescent on her wrist and asked the question out loud to an empty shed, the way she does, and waited through the silence. “So which is it meant to be?” she said. And Nan Ilva, standing in the doorway with her sleeves pushed down and a cup of something hot in her hand, answered her, which she had never done in eleven years of pouring for her.

“It is meant to be a school bell, Tamsin,” she said. “That is not a small answer. It is the whole answer. Cut the curl and nothing else, and let the bell be a small dull thing that says the hour and stops.”

It rang at nine on the Monday, in the wet, with the sun just coming over the schoolyard wall. It was an ordinary sound. It said nine and then it stopped, which is all a school bell is for, and twenty-six children came in out of the rain, and Ansell in the front row said it was the best bell in the county, because you could tell exactly what it wanted.

Two hundred feet away, in a belfry on the new school, the other one Tamsin cut shouted an hour ahead of itself into the roof, so that everybody under it knew a good deal more than they ever wanted to know, and could not unhear it, and did not really want to.