In the wide back kitchen nook directly beneath the arching curve of the Courtesy Bridge, young Tavi was kneeling on the damp flat stone slabs, a stick of white carpenter’s chalk clamped tightly between his ink-stained fingers.
Tavi was fourteen, the son of a Lowbank coal-heaver who had died in the river freeze three winters earlier. He was small for his age, with giant wrists and bright, hyper-vigilant brown eyes that missed nothing. For six months he had run errands for the cart hauling docks, hauling grease buckets and dodging the cudgels of academy beadles. Today, he wore a clean gray wool tunic that Sister Merrow had cut down from an old hospital blanket, his cart driver boots freshly greased with sheep fat.
Before him sat three rough-sawn deal workbenches, salvaged from the abandoned cooperage down by the wharf. Tavi had spent two hours scouring the timber tops with foam-stone and hot river sand until the wood was white, dry, and fully free of old barrel pitch.
Now, guided by the sketches Pella had drawn on his handheld slate, he was drawing full-scale chalk outlines of every tool the Harrowby specialists would carry across the threshold.
“Table One,” Tavi murmured to himself. He held a brass two-foot rule steady with his left knee. Meanwhile, his chalk squealed against the dry pine grain. “Ada Morland. Commercial plumbing.”
