The echoes of the sixth bell of the high-water month were still dying in the rafters as Jon Hale came down from the upper stair landing—where eight-year-old Nell had just met him with Button perched on her sleeve—and descended straight through the quiet kitchen into the cold stone dark of the cellar vault.
His bare feet had barely touched the pine floorboards upstairs when he woke, yet as he hit the bottom limestone flag of the cellar on his knees, the phantom taste of pulverized quarry shale and bitter vitriol was still caked across his tongue. His lungs heaved against the sudden, suffocating absence of mountain wind. Minutes ago by the measure of his memory—five days forward in the ruined amphitheater of the western quarry—forty tons of grey granite had split down a brittle white quartz vein and dropped a fifteen-ton block across Alden Bram’s hips while the orange flash of ten-year-old Darek’s four-ply canvas coat tore the False Gate staging apart. Now there was only the smell of pickled herring brine, wet cedar staves, and the cold grease of the single tallow dip leaning sideways in its iron sconce on the cellar pillar.
Upstairs in the kitchen, the iron porridge kettle murmured over fresh birch kindling, and a puff of sweet woodsmoke drifted down through the tight-fitted pine planks above his head as Elin moved toward the scullery damper Nell had warned him about on the landing.
