There was a particular breed of customer who had ruined more honest evenings for Noll Vey than all the town constables between Greyford and the southern salt marshes put together.
It was never the magistrate with his Latin statute-book, nor the parish schoolmaster who squinted through brass spectacles and quoted Euclid at the card table. Those men were proud of their brains, and a proud brain was as easy to steer as a butcher’s dray—you simply let them catch you in a clumsy, harmless mistake on the left sleeve while your right hand dropped the queen of spades into the tea-urn.
No, the customer who broke a showman’s heart was the carpenter’s apprentice or the retired wheelwright who stood in the second row, ignored the patter, ignored the pretty assistant in the feathered hat, and looked straight at the tenon-joints of the cabinet.
Sella Rusk was thirty years of wheelwrights rolled into one pair of mud-greased boots.
She let go of Hobb’s thick forearm, shifted her ash spear into the crook of her elbow, and dropped into an easy, balanced crouch two paces short of the split-oak skids. She did not touch the bog-oak munition chest with her fingers. Instead, she unhooked the iron-tipped scabbard of her short delving knife from her belt-frog and used the blunt brass chape at the bottom of the leather sheath as a pointer.
“Keep your heels behind the dry flagstone, Hobb,” Sella said without turning her head. “And don’t lean over my shoulder. If there’s a tension wire under the front skid, your weight on the mortar joint will trip the sear.”
“There’s no wire under the skid,” Hobb grumbled, though he obeyed her immediately, taking half a step back and tucking the flat nose of his iron crowbar under his armpit like a reprimanded terrier hiding a bone. “It’s a pay-chest, Sella. You heard Master Vey. A lost company’s silver muster-roll, sitting right in the middle of the hall on oak runners.”
“I heard him,” Sella said. Her brass scabbard-tip hovered an inch from the shining iron shackle of the padlock, never quite making contact. “And if you stopped counting copper saucepans for half a minute and used the eyes you salt pork with, you’d see why my hand is still on my belt.”
Inside the western wall, Noll felt his azure core pulse with a sharp, sour pinch of stage-fright.
Beside the niche, Prit stood with his white filing chalk still poised above the third column of the dark slate. Nothing had written itself across the stone. The balance-beam of the ledger hung dead level in the cold air, waiting for a hand to touch the lock or a crowbar to bite the hasp. So long as Sella kept the big cook from acting on his greed, Hobb’s daydream of copper kettles and black pepper horns was worth precisely as much to the ledger as a tavern song.
“A reasonable precaution, Miss Rusk,” Noll said smoothly through the mortar mouth, careful to keep any rasp of impatience out of his baritone. “In the wild holdings down the valley, I have no doubt the local cores fill their chests with poisoned needles and spring-jaws. A vulgar practice. In this house, however, you have read the slate beside my stone. We do not set maiming-traps for licensed guests.”
“The slate says no lies about health,” Sella replied, her eyes narrowing as she leaned sideways to sight along the bevel of the heavy oak lid. “Wait until I’ve checked whether tetanus counts as health before you ask me to trust an iron hasp. Look here, Hobb. Right on the staple.”
Hobb craned his thick neck forward, squinting down into the pale greenish-white beam of foxfire light. “I see an iron staple, Sella. Good stout smith-work, too. Quarter-inch bar, hand-forged.”
“Look at the inside curve where the shackle rests,” Sella said, pointing with the brass tip of her sheath. “What color is the iron?”
“Grey,” Hobb said. “Like iron.”
“Bright grey,” Sella corrected. “Scoured with river-sandstone since daybreak, and greased with mutton tallow that hasn’t even had time to go rancid in the damp. Put your nose down six inches—don’t touch the wood—and tell me what you smell.”
Hobb bent from the waist, sniffed once with the solemn concentration of a man judging a barrel of December cider, and straightened up with a crease between his bushy eyebrows.
“Mutton fat,” the cook admitted reluctantly. “And a bit of wet hearth-ash.”
“Mutton fat from your own tallow-tin, unless I miss my guess,” Sella said dryly, glancing over her shoulder toward the southeastern corner where Tessa Dene stood beside her clay bucket. “Did you lend the landlord a rag of tallow this morning, girl?”
Tessa’s face remained a model of mason’s neutrality as she wiped the flat of her oak paddle with a twist of sacking. “I grease my drain-trowels so the lime doesn’t pit the steel, Miss Rusk. What the house does with the rag after I set it on the bench isn’t in my contract.”
Bless the girl and her father’s union rules, Noll thought fervently. Aloud, he let out a soft, indulgent chuckle through the limestone seam. “Would you have me present a royal strongbox covered in thirty winters of cellar slime, Miss Rusk? When a gentleman finds an heirloom behind his wainscot, he dusts the brass before company arrives. Polishing the lock does not empty the coffer.”
“No,” Sella agreed, pivoting on the ball of her boot to circle toward the back of the chest. “Polishing the lock only proves somebody handled the outside since midnight. Now come around here, Hobb, and look at the rear hinges.”
Hobb shuffled around the oak skids, his heavy shoulders drooping a fraction of an inch as the imaginary copper stew-pans began to fade in the cold morning light. “Well? They’re strap-hinges, Sella. Rusted black, the way old fort iron ought to be.”
“The straps are rusted,” Sella said, pointing her scabbard tip at the two iron knuckles where the upper and lower leaves met along the back seam of the lid. “Now look at the hinge-pins. And look at the oak grain half an inch below the third rivet.”
Noll winced inside his niche.
When Tessa had pried the lid open at dawn to drop the two pounds of bent horseshoe nails and harrow-teeth inside, one of the thirty-year-old hinge-pins had seized in its rusted barrel. To keep the strap from tearing out of the damp bog-oak, Noll had asked her to tap the pin loose with the poll of her mason’s hammer and knock the white lime-scale out of the joint.
A tiny crescent of pale, dry mortar dust still clung to the greasy collar of the left pin, bright as flour against the dark wood. Worse, right beside the middle rivet, the sharp corner of Tessa’s chisel had left a fresh, yellow scratch in the seasoned oak where she had levered the warped lip free.
“The lid’s been up since the mortar was mixed this morning,” Sella said calmly. She tapped the split-oak skid beneath the box with the brass chape, listening to the dull, hollow clink that answered from inside the timber cavity. “Listen to that ring. A chest holding forty pounds of minted silver sits dead on its runners and sounds like a sack of wet meal when you rap the oak. Whatever is inside this box weighs less than my kettle-pack, and it rattles at the corners like loose scrap.”
“Scrap,” Hobb repeated mournfully. The big cook looked down at the notched pry-bar under his arm, then up at the pale foxfire lichen along the cornice, and finally across the floor toward Noll’s speaking crack. The round, hopeful shine had gone entirely out of his eyes, replaced by the aggrieved dignity of a man who had been promised roast goose and handed a cold turnip. “Master Vey? Did you put old nails in a box and tell me it was royal silver?”
“I told you,” Noll said with all the wounded majesty he could squeeze through half an inch of wet limestone, “that you were looking upon the regimental strongbox of the old border watch, and that a lawful hand claiming the lock would find its due reward! Is a host to be cross-examined like a horse-thief because his hinges are clean? Open the hasp under your delve permit, Miss Rusk, and let the contents speak for themselves!”
Just turn the lock, Noll urged silently, pouring a desperate trickle of warmth into the cornice lichen to keep the greenish beam steady on the padlock. Even a half-believed hunch from Hobb will give me two points if you pop the staple! Don’t walk away and leave me with fourteen pence of crooked iron and an empty debt column!
Beside the niche, Prit slowly lowered his stub of white chalk away from the slate and tucked it back between his dry ribs.
“Zero,” the little bone steward murmured, so softly that only the wall stone heard him. “She has killed the stake, Master. The cook no longer believes there is enough silver in the box to buy a salt-spoon, and the ranger never believed you at all.”
Sella rose from her crouch, dusted a flake of dried mud from the knee of her wool trousers, and slid her sheathed knife back into its belt-frog. There was no anger in her weathered face—only the dry, patient exasperation of an inspector who had walked up a steep hill before breakfast to examine a painted wooden pumpkin.
“It stays shut,” Sella said flatly. “I don’t waste pick-steel on stage props, and I don’t sign salvage sheets for two pounds of buttery nails. If you want a crossing fee for the morning’s walk, Master Vey, I’ll leave four copper bits on the bench when we finish checking the eastern rafters. Come along, Hobb. Let’s look at the roof gap before the valley mist turns to rain.”
“Four copper bits,” Hobb muttered under his breath, shoving his iron crowbar back through his apron belt with a disgusted tug. “I had the pepper horn picked out in my head, too. The big curved horn with the brass stopper in Mother Garrow’s shop window.”
Noll felt his core dim by a whole shade inside the dark socket of the wall. Four hours of dragging bog-oak over iced flagstones, half a measure of stored force squandered on ditch-moss and cellar fungus, and his grand financial windfall had produced precisely nothing except a lecture on hinge-pins and four pennies of charity copper.
Sella turned toward the eastern end of the hall, her patched shield swinging back into line at her hip. “Fen? Leave the box and bring the plumb-line. We’re measuring the chimney lean.”
No answer came from the middle of the floor.
Sella paused, looking back over her shoulder. “Fen?”
The young healer had not followed Hobb away from the skids. His canvas herb-satchel had slipped from his shoulder to rest against his ankle, and he had dropped to both knees on the cold flagstones beside the lower right corner of the munition chest—the corner still crusted with thirty-year-old soot and dried moss that neither Noll nor Tessa had bothered to scrape clean.