At three hundred and eighteen confirmed receipts, Tomas Reed and Mara Flint stood in the rain outside the old limestone chapel on High Bridge. The building had been erected eighty years before by the United Guild of Masons as a house of prayer for quarrymen and stonecutters. But thirty years ago, the town revenue board had seized the nave, partitioned the carved oak pews into clerks’ cubicles. Then it turned the altar into a counter for collecting bridge tolls.
Mara Flint, elder of the Old Flint quarry community, ran her rough, dust-whitened fingers over the weathered stone doorpost. She was sixty-four, her shoulders stooped from a lifetime of dressing granite blocks. Her skin smelled of lime-dust and shale oil. In her arms she carried an iron-banded cedar box containing the recovered voice deposit of Kaelen Vane. The master mason who had carved the very keystones of the High Bridge before perishing in the flood.
“Kaelen left strict instructions in his deposit,” Mara said, her voice rough as sandstone. “He wrote: Place my plate beneath the foundation stone of the Chapel altar. There, the young apprentices say their prayers before going down into the pits. The city took the altar and made it a tax counter. Where do we put his words now, Tomas?”
Inside the chapel, three young town clerks sat behind their ink-stained desks. He stared nervously at Tomas’s pack frame and Mara’s heavy stonecutter’s mallet.
Tomas walked into the center of the hall, his leather boots clicking against the flat stone slabs. He ignored the clerks, walked directly to the eastern wall where the ancient limestone altar table had been boxed in with pine planks. Then he tapped the stone keystone with his brass rule.
“Under Section Thirty-One of the Religious and Sacred Trusts Act,” Tomas declared, his voice echoing off the vaulted stone ceiling, “any public structure erected on dedicated common ground that ceases to perform its sacred purpose reverts to the custody of the original donor community. This altar was consecrated with the sweat of Old Flint stonecutters. We’re not evicting your clerks today, gentlemen. But we’re restoring the master’s name to his own stonework.”
Mara Flint stepped forward with her chisel and hammer. With three deft, powerful blows, she popped the pine facing from the front of the ancient limestone altar. She exposed the carved hollow left by Kaelen Vane eighty years before. She placed the bronze canister into the niche, bedded it in fresh high-pressure lime mortar. Then she smoothed the joint with her trowel.
The clerks didn’t protest. One of them, a young man whose grandfather had been a quarryman, quietly stood up, took off his wool cap. Then they bowed his head.
When the senior toll-clerk—a balding man in a frayed bombasine coat named Vess—found his voice, he didn’t reach for the watch-bell on his desk. Instead, he pointed a shaking ink-stained finger toward the wooden partition that boxed in the north cross-hall behind his high stool. “If you leave that bronze metal tube exposed in the limestone niche, Carrier, the Night Receiver from the Bridge Revenue Board will pry it out with a crowbar when he comes at six o’clock to empty the iron toll-chests. He has a standing warrant from the treasury board to strip any secret brass or bronze fixtures found inside the toll-house.”
Mara Flint paused with her pointing trowel in her hand. Her gray eyebrows drew together over her weathered cheeks. “Let him bring his crowbar,” she said grimly. She tapped the head of her four-pound iron stone-mallet against her palm. “I’ll leave two of my wedge-men sitting on the altar steps all winter if that’s what it takes to keep a thief’s fingers off Kaelen Vane’s work.”
“You’ll not need to post guards through the winter, Mara,” Tomas said. He stepped to the north side of the ancient limestone altar where the town carpenters had nailed cheap deal wainscoting over the original dressed stone. Tomas kept his braced left forearm tucked safely inside his wool sling. He slid the brass tip of his folding rule into the joint behind the pine baseboard and pried outward until the rusty brads squealed out of the mortar.
Behind the pine plank, carved four inches deep into the living blue-gray limestone of the altar base, stood the original mason’s guild-promise shield. A crossed compass and bush-hammer flanked by the royal quarry charter cipher of the old Duke’s grandfather, dated eighty-two years before the flood. Below the shield, cut in two-inch Roman capitals that no tax clerk had bothered to read before nailing up the deal boards, ran the unending dedication clause. THIS STONE AND FOUR FEET CALCULATED AROUND ITS Stone base ARE VESTED IN THE FREE MASONS OF OLD FLINT WITHOUT RENT OR ESCHEAT WHILE HIGH BRIDGE STANDS UPON ITS PIERS.
Tomas beckoned to the young clerk who had removed his wool cap. “What’s your name, friend, and what book are you keeping on that desk?”
“Perrin, Master Carrier,” the young man answered. He stepped out from behind the wooden cubicle with a heavy leather-bound volume under his arm. “My grandfather was Joran of the third quarry bench. I keep the Bridge Fabric & Pier Inspection Register for the district land-mapper.”
“Bring your register here, Perrin,” Tomas said. He laid his own waterproof courier folio beside the freshly mortared niche where Kaelen Vane’s canister sat snug in the high-pressure lime. “Under the Royal Quarry Charter carved into this stone base, the altar stone and a four-foot outer edge around its base are exempt from town revenue turf for as long as High Bridge stands on its piers. The Revenue Board only holds a tenancy-at-will in the outer nave. If we enter Kaelen Vane’s canister into your official Bridge Fabric Register as a load-bearing benchmark and load-seal of the eastern bridge pillar pier, what’s the penalty under the Highway and Bridge Act for any person who disturbs it?”
A slow, understanding-filled light dawned in young Perrin’s eyes. He laid the heavy Bridge Fabric Register open on the corner of the limestone altar and turned to the Schedule of Protected Benchmarks. “Under Chapter Seven of the Highway Act, any person—including a town revenue collector—who pries, defaces, or removes a registered mason’s benchmark from a chartered bridge pillar is guilty of felony sabotage of the King’s highway, punishable by three years in the quarry Hulks without benefit of bail.”
Even Senior Clerk Vess let out a low breath behind his counter. He looked from the eighty-year-old royal cipher uncovered in the stone to the blue Circuit Bond Court ribbon hanging from Tomas’s satchel. Slowly, Vess reached into his desk drawer, drew out the official brass wafer-seal of the High Bridge Toll-Office. Then he pushed it across the ink-stained pine toward Perrin.
“Enter it in the Fabric Book, Perrin,” Vess said quietly. He buttoned his frayed bombasine coat against the damp river draft blowing through the chapel doors. “God knows the Revenue Board has collected enough pennies over Kaelen Vane’s arches without paying a farthing toward repointing the piers since the flood. If the Night Receiver asks why the pine boards were taken down from the east wall, I’ll show him the Highway Act myself.”
While Perrin wrote the benchmark registration in bold, formal script and stamped the page with the bridge wafer, Mara Flint took a flat slab of dressed blue limestone she had brought in the bottom of her tool-basket. A piece cut from the very same Old Flint stratum Kaelen Vane had worked eighty years ago. She buttered the beveled edges with stiff high-pressure lime mortar, slid the stone slab flush into the recess over the bronze canister. Then she struck the face three light, ringing taps with the wooden butt of her mallet handle until the joint was narrower than a knife-blade.
With the point of her steel chisel, Mara cut Kaelen Vane’s three-stroke mason’s mark into the center of the fresh stone plug. Then she stepped back and handed Tomas the signed receipt slip.
“His name is back in the stone he cut,” Mara whispered. She wiped mortar from her apron. “The bridge will hold now, Tomas. Honest work knows its own foundation.”