Chapter 9
The next morning, six men climbed down from the cart in the early gray light, coats already over their arms, boots thick with old mud, and stood in a loose half circle looking up at the gray bones of Russell Hall.
"Place looks fit to fall on itself," one of them muttered.
Benjamin came out from the archway to meet them, sleeves already rolled, gloves tucked into his back pocket.
"I know some of you will hear about this work in the village and be asked why you took it.
" He said it plainly, before anyone could ask him first. "It happened to me, when I decided to stop letting a good estate rot for the sake of old business none of us had any hand in.
This village deserves better than an abandoned house sitting empty at its edge.
I am told it was once the finest thing in Ashcombe. I intend to make it so again."
The men exchanged glances.
"We have families to feed," one of them said finally, older, thickset, a beard gone half to gray. "You give us what you promised at the inn, we will not trouble you with questions. We will work."
"Fair enough."
He set them to it — the roof first, the main hall, the north wing already cleared enough to move timber through — and by the time the sun had cleared the trees the sound of hammers and saws was rolling across the estate for the first time in twenty years.
Benjamin did not stand apart from it. He worked alongside them, carrying beams, bracing ladders, pulling rotted planks from doorframes with his own hands, and his instructions were short and exact and mostly right.
"Weight lower," he told a young worker fighting a jack that would not sit true. "Anchor it on your knee, not your back. Your spine will thank you at forty."
The man shifted, and the jack held, and he looked faintly surprised that it had worked.
Later, when Benjamin came past a second time and found the same young man setting a brace at an angle that would not hold the load once it took weight, he stopped and crouched beside him.
"Turn it a hand's width that way," he said, "or it will give the moment the beam settles onto it."
The young man straightened, jaw tight. "You think you know my own trade better than I do?"
The hammering nearby slowed. A few heads turned.
"You pay us," the man went on, color rising. "We work. That is the arrangement. You do not command us like we are men under your orders. We are not slaves."
Benjamin was quiet a moment.
"You are right to say so," he said. "And I apologize.
It is an old habit from my years in the army, and I should have made the terms plain before I ever picked up a tool this morning, not after.
" He looked round at the rest of them, not raising his voice.
"I do not care where any of you come from, or what your circumstances are.
On a job like this, the man with the better plan is the one the rest of us follow — whoever he is.
That includes me, when I am wrong. I will take correction as readily as I give it, and I mean that.
" He turned back to the young man. "But if you find you cannot take direction when it matters — mine or another man's — then I would rather you tell me now than halfway up that roof.
Orders will be given on this work. Somebody has to give them. "
The young man did not answer at once.
"Easy, lad." The bearded man — Thomas, the same one who had come to their table at the inn — crossed over and set a hand on his shoulder.
"He is not wrong, and neither were you for saying so.
" He looked at Benjamin with something like approval.
"Sir, I will say it plain — that is exactly how they ran things where I trained, years back.
You had a rank, I would wager. Man does not stand like that without one. "
"Captain."
"That explains a fair bit." Thomas nodded, satisfied, and turned the young man toward the far side of the hall with a light shove. "Go and see to the window frames instead. I will finish this."
He knelt where the young man had been and set the brace exactly as Benjamin had said, and it held.
By the middle of the morning the heat had come up off the stone and they had found their rhythm besides, and it held until Thomas, halfway up a ladder, called down that the second bundle of iron bracing had not come with the wagon — someone had short-ordered it, or the smith had simply forgotten, and there was no finishing the stairwell without it.
"Jacob." Thomas nodded at the young man nearest the door. "Off to the smith's, then. Tell him we want it before dark or he can keep his custom for someone else."
Jacob's face did not much like the errand, though he said nothing, only set down what he was holding and started toward the drive.
Benjamin caught him before he had gone ten paces.
"It is my error, not yours." He held out a hand for the list Thomas had scrawled. "I ordered the materials. If something is short, I am the one who should be walking to fetch it, not you. Go back to your work."
"You will not carry it." Thomas said it from the top of the ladder, without looking down. "Not the bracing and the pins and the rest of it, not a mile and a half. Nobody carries that on his own." He drove a nail. "Take the boy."
Jacob's jaw set.
He did not say anything. He did not have to; it was in the whole of him, in the way he picked his coat up off the beam and did not look at either of them while he did it — a young man who had been made an errand boy in front of five others and was being made one twice over now.
Benjamin saw it.
"Any man on this ground can carry timber," he said, unhurried.
"I have six of them and every one of them has arms. If you would rather not miss three hours of the roof, say so plainly and I shall take Fletcher instead.
" He put the list in his pocket. "Only understand what I am offering you.
It is a mile and a half there and a mile and a half back on a good road, and none of it is being spent up on that scaffold in this sun. "
Jacob opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
He looked at the roofline. He looked at Fletcher, who had already begun, with great tact, to become interested in something else entirely.
Then he nodded once, and slung the coat over his arm rather than putting it on, and fell in.
They went down the drive together and out between the piers and neither of them said a word for the first quarter mile. Jacob walked half a pace behind, which Benjamin let him do, and looked at the hedgerows on his own side of the road, which Benjamin let him do as well.
Somewhere past the milestone Benjamin spoke, without turning his head.
"Is the food any good at that inn?"
There was a pause of exactly the length required to make a point.
"It is good enough," Jacob said.
"Good."
And that was the whole of it. They walked the rest of the way in silence, and Jacob spent a fair portion of it working out whether he had just been managed, and did not arrive at an answer he liked.
◆◆◆
The morning had come up hot and clean and entirely without wind, and the Baron had insisted on the long way round.
"There," he said, gesturing at the lane ahead of them with his stick as though he had arranged the weather himself. "Now that is a morning worth putting boots on for."
"It is."
"I cannot recall the last time we walked out together, you and I."
Amelia thought about it. "Easter."
"Easter." Her father made a small sound. "That is a considerable while for two people who sleep under the same roof."
They came round the bend at the top of the market square, and he stopped.
Two men were coming out of the smithy on the far side, one of them with a bundle of iron over his shoulder and the other carrying a basket.
It was the young one Amelia knew — Jacob, the widow's boy from the mill road — and he was laughing at something, laughing properly, head back.
And the other one, was her new neighbor.
Then Jacob saw who was standing at the top of the square and got himself in order in about half a second.
"Good morning, my lord." He got his cap off. "Lady Amelia."
"Good morning, Jacob." The Baron said it easily. "How is your mother?"
"Much the same, my lord. As you know." A pause, and then the chin came up. "But she is strong."
"I know she is." Her father let that sit a beat. "Send her my regards."
"I will, sir."
"And you might clean your shirt," Amelia said.
Jacob looked down. There was a broad smear of something yellow across the front of it, and he went red from the collar up.
"We stopped at the inn," he said. "The eggs were very good today, my lady. I thank you." He set the basket down and reached for the iron. "Now if you will excuse me, I have to carry these—"
"Not those."
Benjamin said it without any weight on it at all, and shifted the bundle further onto his own shoulder.
"You take the food."
"But they are heavy, sir, and your back—"
"I am not so old as that, Jacob." Something moved at the corner of Benjamin's mouth. "Take the food and come on."
Jacob took the food.
Benjamin inclined his head. "My lord. My lady."
And the two of them went off down the lane, the boy talking again before they had gone twenty paces, and Amelia watched them the whole way to the corner and only noticed she was doing it when her father's silence beside her went on a beat too long.
"An interesting fellow," the Baron said. "Our new neighbor."
He set off again. "Frederick tells me you met him. And that you helped him find men for the work."
Amelia kept her eyes forward. "You raised me to be kind to my neighbors, Father. I only did as you taught me."
"Of course." A faint, dry note in his voice, though not unkind.
"I am not scolding you for it. I confess I am curious about him myself — cautious, the way Frederick is cautious, but curious as well.
I mean to introduce myself in the coming days.
Perhaps invite him to dine, in time. I will decide once I have met him properly and formed my own opinion, rather than borrowing Frederick's. "