The scrape of an iron adze blade and the rhythmic thud of an ash-wood cane sounded in the scullery passage before the third bell finished tolling. Alden Bram came through the doorway sideways to clear his heavy shoulders, dragging a low timber hand-barrow carrying two heavy cast-iron screw-jacks and four square-hewn oak baulks. His left trouser leg was tied with leather thongs around a cedar splint, the relic of the injury he had taken when the false gate collapsed in the previous life.
“Stand back from the brink, Elin,” the master mason rumbled, his voice like river gravel turning in an undertow. “If that sister-joist drops another half-inch, thirty feet of chimney will follow it straight into the cellar.”
Bram knelt stiffly on his sound right knee at the edge of the pit. Working together, he and Jon lowered the first cast-iron screw-jack into the dark gap, seating its flared base upon the sound limestone bench below the ruptured flume. Jon slid the second jack beneath the north load-bearing sill. With short, grunting turns of the iron levers, Bram tightened the screws until the scorched heart-pine groaned, leveled, and locked into true alignment.
“Drive the oak wedges under the shoulder,” Bram ordered, wiping soot from his grey eyebrows with the back of a mortar-crusted wrist. “Hard, Jon. Give the stone no room to creep.”
