Chapter Eighteen #2
William directed the work with the steady economy of a man who had been managing a kitchen for thirty years and who treated the fire damage with the same practical attention he gave to a batch of bread that had not risen properly.
The damage was a problem. Problems had solutions.
Solutions required work. Work required hands.
Thomas had hands. Therefore Thomas would work.
“Your Grace, hold this beam while I reset the bracket.”
Thomas held the beam, his arms straining visibly, and there was nothing elegant in the strain of it. It was the plain, practical effort of a man holding a heavy piece of wood steady while someone else hammered, and the plainness of it was rather the point.
“Higher,” William said.
Thomas raised the beam higher.
“Hold it steady there, if you can,” William said.
“I am holding it steady.”
“You are shaking.”
“The beam is heavy.”
“The beam is heavy. That is why I asked you to hold it. I did not have anyone else tall enough.”
“I am gratified to be of structural use.”
“You should be. Structural use is the highest compliment a bakery can pay.”
Margaret appeared periodically to inspect the cleaning.
Her inspections were thorough and her standards were the standards of a woman who had spent her life ensuring that every surface in the bakery met a level of cleanliness that bordered on the philosophical.
Soot that Jane considered clean, Margaret found insufficient.
Soot that Thomas considered invisible, Margaret located with a damp finger and an expression of mild reproach.
“This section is not finished,” Margaret said, running her hand along a beam Thomas had scrubbed twice.
“I have scrubbed it twice.”
“Then it requires a third. The soot is embedded in the grain.”
“I cannot see the soot.”
“The soot does not care whether you can see it. The soot exists. Your job is to remove the existence, not to evaluate the visibility.”
Thomas scrubbed the beam a third time. Margaret inspected and pronounced it adequate.
Thomas accepted the pronouncement with the same expression he wore when Mrs. Vale judged his wife’s pastry, the expression of a man who understood that adequacy, from Margaret Rennet, outweighed enthusiasm from anyone else.
By midday the back wall was clean and the oven assessment was complete.
The flue had been removed and the replacement ordered from a smith in the county town who Margaret had already contacted, because Margaret’s capacity for logistics operated at a speed that outpaced most people’s capacity for thought.
Lottie was sweeping the shop-front, her broom assailing the stones with the determined vigor of a woman whose resentment over the fire was being vented entirely upon the bristles.
She had been the first to smell the chemical sharpness of the lamp oil in the flue, and it gnawed at her, because to have smelled it meant she had stood close enough to be in danger, and Lottie had no desire at all for being in danger.
“Your Grace,” Lottie said, pausing in her sweeping. “You have soot on your face.”
“I am aware.”
“The soot is distributed evenly. It looks intentional.”
“It was not intentional.”
“It suits you. You look like a person who has been doing work, which is a significant improvement over looking like a person who has been doing nothing while other people do work.”
“Thank you, Lottie.”
“You are welcome. There is more soot on the left wall if you would like to complete the look.”
Jane’s mother appeared from the kitchen with a fresh batch of rolls and a pot of soup that she had produced from ingredients Jane could not identify and which smelled, despite the surrounding smell of soot and damage, extraordinary.
The soup appeared at the same moment the work paused for midday, because Jane’s mother’s timing, like Mrs. Vale’s timing, was a professional skill that operated independently of conscious thought.
They ate lunch in the bakery yard. Bread and cheese and soup, sitting on the step in thin autumn sunshine with soot under their fingernails and exhaustion upon their shoulders.
Thomas sat beside William. Jane sat beside her mother.
Margaret sat on an upturned crate and ate with the focused efficiency of a woman who considered lunch an interruption rather than a complement.
Lottie sat on the ground with her legs crossed and her broom beside her and her expression holding the particular brightness which meant it was a certain prelude to some shrewd remark. “Thomas has blisters.”
“I have blisters,” Thomas confirmed.
“Real blisters. Working blisters. Not the kind a person gets from holding a quill too long.”
“I have held many quills Lottie. None of them produced blisters.”
“That is because quills are not honest work. Scrubbing is honest work. My father says honest work leaves marks, and the marks are the proof.”
“Your father is a wise man.”
“My father is a baker. Bakers and wise men have a great deal in common, though neither would claim the comparison.”
William, who had been eating bread with the steady attention of a man evaluating his own product even while exhausted, looked at Thomas across the yard. “You did well this morning, Your Grace.”
“I scrubbed a wall.”
“You scrubbed a wall in a building that is not yours, for a family that is not yet legally yours, without being asked and without complaining. That is not scrubbing. That is character.”
The sentence landed in the yard with the weight of a benediction.
Thomas looked at William, and William looked at Thomas, and the exchange was the same exchange they had shared at the bakery table when William accepted the lease terms and extended his hand.
The exchange of men who understood each other through action rather than declaration, and whose understanding was deeper for the absence of decoration.
Sam brought Thomas a second piece of bread without being asked.
The gesture was small, the gesture of a boy who had watched a man work all morning and who understood, at the age Jane had understood it, that people who worked in the bakery received bread, and to be handed it was to be counted one of them.
Thomas accepted the bread. He ate it seated upon the step of a bakehouse that was not his own, in a yard to which he had no claim, beside a man who was not his father; with soot upon his hands and flour coating his trousers, he had not the least defense left remaining about him.
Such tranquility was entirely new to his experience.
It was the first time Jane had seen him at once untended and untroubled; his habitual vigilance was rendered simply unnecessary where those around him demanded nothing of the kind, and in that very forbearance lay the perfect acceptance he had sought since the he said ‘good’ to a tray of tartlets and meant something larger than the word could hold.