The larder behind Sister Merrow’s kitchen washroom was seven feet deep and five feet wide. He smelled of dried salt cod, sackcloth, and forty years of rancid lard that had soaked into the cedar wall-battens.
At the back of the small room, half-hidden behind two tiers of empty pickling crocks, rose the partition wall. Eight inches of rough-dressed river limestone laid in crumbly, gray-green lime mortar that had begun to cry long, chalky stalactites of saltpeter along the floor joints.
Eren stood between the shelves with a six-foot ash lever bar in his hands, squinting at the heavy oak ceiling beam directly overhead.
“That beam carries the floor beams of the old sick room loft,” he said. He tapped the dark, hand-hewn timber with the butt of his bar. A small shower of dry wood-worm frass drifted down into his hair. “If you knock three feet of stone out of the bottom of this partition without wooden props the head, that oak beam will drop an inch and a half before sunset. When an oak beam drops an inch and a half, the floor above buckles, Merrow’s linen press tips over. The whole roof valley starts leaking into the soup kettles.”
Pella, kneeling on the damp flags with a lantern and a mason’s trowel, looked up from the bottom course of stones.
“We aren’t knocking the whole wall down,” she said. She scraped a line of loose white lime from between two blocks. The mortar was so soft from moisture she could dig it out with the point of a table knife. “We just need a crawlway. Three feet high, two feet wide. Enough for Ada to get her shoulders and her tool bag through.”
“Stone doesn’t know the difference between an entrance and a collapse, Pella,” Merrow said from the doorway.
The older woman had her wooden soup paddle tucked under her arm like a sergeant’s swagger stick, her stiff knee clicking as she planted her boots firmly in the larder opening. She held a greasy, folded piece of parchment between two flour-dusted fingers.
“What’s that?” Pella asked, squinting in the lantern light.
“That,” Merrow said, tossing the paper onto the pickling crocks, “is a Section Twelve Load-bearing Notice from the Municipal Board of Works. Issued twelve years ago. Just then, the brewery tried to knock a doorway through the cellar wall into the old canal vault. It says that anyone who breaches an underground stonework wall without a stamped permit from the City Land-mapper is subject to forty silver crowns in fines and thirty days in the pillory on the North Quay.”
Eren picked up the paper, glanced at the faded iron-gall seal. Then it turned it over to see if the reverse side was clean enough to use for chalk notes.
“The City Land-mapper died during the cholera three years back,” Eren remarked. “His office was turned into a grain registry. If you go up there today asking for a Section Twelve permit, the clerk will ask you for three silver coins to file the paper, tell you to come back after the spring melt. Then lose the folder behind the stove.”
“I know that,” Merrow snapped. “And you know that. But the beadles who patrol the quay don’t know that. They know that if they see stone dust coming out of my kitchen window, they have an excuse to lock the gate and search the larders for untaxed salt.”
She stepped into the small room, her sharp eyes scanning the ceiling floor beams, the limestone wall. The heavy oak shores Eren had dragged in from the yard.
“If you’re going to knock that stone out,” she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, uncompromising clinic register, “you do it right. You don’t tap at it with a little chisel like an apprentice looking for a dropped sixpence. You set the timber shores first. You wedge them tight until the ceiling creaks. You take the stones out one by one. You stack them neatly against the north wall so we can put them back if the watch comes knocking.”
“That’s why I brought the heart-oak,” Eren said. He gestured to the two massive eight-by-eight posts leaning in the hallway.
He picked up the first shore, hoisted it onto his shoulder with an easy, practiced heave that showed the thickness of his back muscles. Then he maneuvered it through the larder door. He set the bottom of the post onto a broad oak doorstep-plate spread across the flat stone slabs to distribute the weight, then tilted the top until it seated squarely under the main ceiling beam.
“Hold the foot,” he told Pella.
Pella dropped to her knees, planting her boots against the doorstep-plate. Her hands gripped the rough, splintery bark of the oak post.
Eren took two narrowed ash wedges from his belt, slipped them between the top of the post and the underside of the ceiling beam. Then they picked up his heavy cast-steel club hammer.
He struck once.
The sound in the small, enclosed larder was a sharp, bone-shaking crack. Dust puffed from the old plaster overhead.
He struck again.
The wedges slid home half an inch. The great ceiling beam groaned, a deep, stringy complaint of old heart-timber taking on an unexpected load.
He struck a third time.
The sound changed from a hollow wooden knock to a sharp, high-pitched ring. The oak post went rigid under Pella’s hands. It shook with a high, tight tension that felt like an iron column.
“Shore one set,” Eren grunted, wiping sweat from his eyebrows with his sleeve. “Bring the second one in.”
Ten minutes later, the second oak post was wedged two feet to the left of the first, the pair forming a sturdy timber portal that framed the section of limestone wall they intended to breach. Across the top, Eren drove two heavy forged-steel dog-irons—four-inch staples of half-inch square iron—pinning the heads of the posts directly into the ceiling beam so they couldn’t kick out if the wall shifted.
He dropped his hammer back into the tool box and took his brass spirit level from his apron. He checked the level header. He watched the bubble settle dead center between the two fine scratches.
“Now,” he said, looking at Pella. “The ceiling won’t move even if you drop a team of heavy cart horses through the loft. But what’s behind that stone isn’t empty air, Pella. Can you feel the mortar?”
Pella placed her bare palm against the limestone blocks between the two oak shores.
The stone was cold, but the mortar joints were not. A faint, humid warmth radiated from the hairline cracks between the lime courses. It carried a strange, metal smell that made the back of her throat prickle. The smell of hot stale river water, decayed reeds, and the faint, bitter trace of sulfur.
And beneath her palm, so faint she could only feel it. Just then, she held her breath, the stone was humming.
A slow, rhythmic shaking, pulsing once every four seconds.
Thrum... Thrum... Thrum.
Eren took his two-foot wooden framing square and held it against the corner of the oak shores. The blade sat true, perfectly ninety degrees against the doorstep-plate.
“When you shore a ceiling,” he explained, tapping the timber with his knuckles, “the danger isn’t that the post breaks in half. Heart-oak will carry twenty thousand pounds before the grain crushes. The danger is that the top of the post kicks sideways. That was because the ceiling beam sags on the bias. That’s why we drive the dog-irons across the joint at forty-five degrees.”
Pella watched him drive the second forged staple into the oak. The iron was black and rough from the charcoal forge, its pointed ends barbed like fish-hooks to keep them from backing out under shaking.
“Sister Merrow,” Pella called toward the kitchen door. “Can you move the lard jars off the top shelf in the hall? If the wall vibrates, they might walk off the timber.”
“Already moved them, girl,” Merrow’s voice answered from behind the soup kettles. “Moved them forty minutes ago while you were still arguing over the foreign ruler. And I put down a straw blade collar along the door doorstep so the stone dust doesn’t crawl into the bread pantry.”
Eren picked up his mason’s hammer—a heavy tool with a square striking face on one side and a level chisel-edge on the other. He tested the lime mortar between the fourth and fifth courses with the chisel-edge.
“Mortar is soft as dried porridge,” he muttered. “They built this partition after the flood of Year Fourteen to seal off the old upkeep tunnel. They used local river lime without enough sharp sand to bind it. It’s held up because it was dry for twelve years. But now that the humidity has come back through the brick, it’s turning back into chalk.”
He turned to Pella, handing her an empty wicker basket lined with heavy sailcloth.
“When the stones come out,” he instructed, “you catch the rubble in this basket. We don’t drop forty-pound blocks on the flags. We lay them in the basket and slide them out into the back kitchen. If a stone cracks on the floor, the noise will travel straight up the chimney pipe into the street.”
“I’ve got the basket,” Pella said, kneeling firmly on the rubber mat.
“That’s the drain tube,” she whispered.
“That’s the Hollow Crown,” Eren corrected, picking up his cold chisel and his five-pound sledge. “Ready your lantern, Pella. The lunch bell is ringing from the High Terraces.”