Chapter 2
The third stair shifted beneath Henry’s right boot with the furtive movement of a man attempting to leave a card table before his debts were counted. He transferred his weight to the banister and stopped before the movement reached his left knee.
Joseph Hales, standing two steps below, watched the stair rather than Henry. “That one is merely loose, Your Grace. The next has ambition.”
Henry looked upward. The east staircase turned at a square landing, climbed another six steps, and disappeared beneath a ceiling stained the color of old tea.
Wet plaster darkened the wall beside the landing.
A bucket stood under the worst of the leak, leaving barely enough room for a broad man and considerably less for one obliged to mind where he placed his leg.
“Ambition toward what?” Henry asked. “The ground floor?”
“The cellar, if given time.”
Joseph climbed past him with the practiced economy of a man who had long ago ceased performing difficulty for other people’s instruction.
His wooden left leg struck the stair with a sound distinct from his right boot, but his balance remained sure.
He planted one hand against the wall above the seventh tread and pressed.
The edge of the step dipped.
Henry’s knee objected when he adjusted his stance.
Cold had settled into the joint during the journey from Kent and sharpened while he stood in the front hall reading Croft’s notice.
Changing into dry clothes had warmed the rest of him without persuading the knee that October in London was a civilised arrangement.
He kept his hand loose on the banister. “No one should be using this flight.”
“Twenty-six men live in the house. Four work above us, two sleep there, and the shortest route from the old dining room to the carpentry shop passes beneath this landing.”
“Close the stair and replace it.”
Joseph regarded him.
Henry knew that look. Sergeants had employed versions of it when a young officer issued an order that was possible in theory, ruinous in practice, and destined to be obeyed only long enough to prove its foolishness.
“The whole stair?” Joseph asked.
“The unsafe portion.”
“That is the whole stair, once the boards come up.”
“Then replace the whole stair.”
“With which timber?”
Henry glanced toward the open doorway at the foot of the flight. Beyond it, two men carried a pair of planed chair rails through the corridor. The smell of linseed oil came with them, warmer than the wet plaster and old dust of the stairwell.
“I shall purchase timber,” he said.
“From whom?”
“A builder.”
“Which builder?”
“One who can begin immediately.”
Joseph shifted his carpenter’s shoulders against the wall.
“The man who offers to begin immediately will charge for the privilege, bring timber too green for interior work, and send laborers who do not know where the residents sleep or which doors must remain passable. He will also want half his money before he unloads a board.”
“Then I shall pay him.”
“And where shall the men upstairs sleep while he opens the landing?”
“In other rooms.”
“Which rooms?”
Henry looked past him at the damp wall.
Joseph waited with caustic patience. He did not appear to enjoy the exchange. That made it more effective.
“You have a work plan,” Henry said.
“I have the beginning of one.”
“Show me.”
Joseph drew a folded sheet from his coat pocket.
The paper had been ruled in Thomas Bevan’s fine hand, with materials listed on the left and hours of labor on the right.
Three possible sequences occupied the lower half.
Each preserved access to one portion of the east wing while the other was opened.
Henry read it twice.
“You intend to brace the landing from below, replace two treads, move the upstairs residents to the west rooms, and then uncover the stringer.”
“After the cabinet is delivered.”
“The cabinet can wait.”
“The cabinet pays for the oak.”
“I will pay for the oak.”
Joseph’s face did not alter. “Then the cabinet still cannot wait. A customer who pays on delivery becomes a customer who orders again. A duke who pays for oak becomes a duke who may decide next month that he has paid enough.”
The words were not insolent. They were worse: they were an assessment of risk made by a man with experience.
Henry handed the plan back. “You do not know me.”
“No, Your Grace.”
“You knew my aunt.”
“I knew she remembered the House at Christmas and forgot it in March.”
Henry accepted the blow because it had not been aimed at the dead woman’s affection. It had been aimed at the limits of affection unaccompanied by administration.
“Very well,” he said. “The cabinet is delivered first. You will give me the materials cost for this sequence and a second estimate for replacing the full stair once the wing can be cleared.”
Joseph folded the plan along its existing crease. “Mrs. Ellison already has both.”
“Of course she does.”
“She dislikes being surprised by prices.”
“A character flaw of uncommon severity.”
Joseph’s mouth shifted, though not far enough to qualify as a smile. “There is another difficulty.”
Henry looked at the bucket on the landing. “Only one?”
“The men will not leave the rooms merely because you tell them the stair is unsafe.”
“It is unsafe.”
“They know. They have been carrying the bucket around it for six weeks.”
“Then they have stronger reason to move.”
“They have stronger reason to demand where, for how long, and whether they will return. Two were moved from their last lodging for repairs and found other tenants in their beds when they came back.”
Henry looked upward again. A figure had appeared at the top of the flight, a thin man in shirtsleeves holding a stack of folded paper against his chest. Thomas Bevan waited rather than attempting to pass them in the narrowed space.
Henry stepped back toward the wall. The movement sent a clean line of pain through his knee, but it cleared the stair.
“Do the residents vote on repairs?” he asked.
Joseph tucked the plan away. “They vote on risks taken in their name. Mrs. Ellison decides the work schedule. I decide whether a board will bear weight. Sarah decides whether moving a man will cost him more sleep than leaving him under a bucket. No one has yet found the need for a duke.”
Thomas descended carefully, turning his body at the landing to protect the papers from the damp plaster. Henry noticed that the top sheet carried columns of figures rather than personal correspondence.
“The need may have arisen,” Henry said.
Thomas stopped one tread above him. “That depends upon whether Your Grace means to be useful.”
His voice was quiet, with the breath measured between phrases. There was no challenge in his expression, only the reasonable caution of a man whose papers Henry had gathered from the floor that morning.
“I have been given similar advice,” Henry said. “Repeatedly.”
Thomas glanced toward Joseph. “Then the House has begun efficiently.”
He continued down. Joseph followed, leaving Henry to take the last steps at his own pace.
The knee was not yet bad enough to require explanation. That was the line he had used through the carriage journey, the map-room change of clothes, and the first half of the inspection. He had long experience moving lines after he crossed them.
At the bottom of the stairs, the corridor broadened toward the workshop.
Doors had been removed from two adjoining rooms to create one long working space, and a line of high windows admitted a thin gray light.
The air held sawdust, linseed oil, and the warmer scent of glue.
Benches stood beneath the windows. Chair frames, cabinet panels, writing-desk legs, and stacks of sanded boards occupied the walls in an order Henry understood only after observing how men moved between them.
He had expected beds.
Not entirely, and not consciously. He had known the House maintained workshops.
He had read the words in his aunt’s letters and seen the income lines in one annual report.
Yet somewhere between “former soldiers,” “refuge,” and “charitable trust,” his mind had constructed rows of narrow bedsteads and men waiting gratefully for soup.
The room before him contained argument, wages, splinters, bad language, and work proceeding without concern for his assumptions.
A man at the nearest bench held a cabinet door steady while another checked the fit of its hinges.
Farther along, Thomas set his papers beside a half-built writing desk and began comparing measurements.
A resident with two intact legs sat to plane a chair rail while a one-armed man beside him marked lengths upon the next board.
No one arranged himself into an improving picture.
Joseph moved to the cabinet. “The door has dropped.”
“It has not,” said the man holding it. “The floor has risen.”
“The floor has been here longer than your excuse.”
“It has had more practice.”
Henry approached. The cabinet was plain, well proportioned, and better made than several pieces in his London house, where ornament had often been employed to distract from indifferent joints.
“When is it due?” he asked.
“This evening,” Joseph said. “If the surgeon’s porter comes when promised.”
“And if he does not?”
“We charge storage after Friday.”
Henry looked at him. “Do you?”
“No. Mrs. Ellison intends to.”
A rasp of laughter moved along the nearest bench. It ceased when the man fitting the hinge glanced toward the far wall.
There, three residents sat at a smaller table with papers spread before them.
One held an official-looking certificate.
Another tapped a finger against a column copied into a daybook.
Their stillness differed from the concentration of the craftsmen.
It had the stale quality of waiting repeated too often.
Henry crossed toward them. “What are those?”
The oldest of the three rose halfway before Joseph said, “Sit, Mercer. His Grace can inspect paper without a parade.”
The man lowered himself again, not gratefully. “Pension certificates.”