Intermission: The Bakehouse Floor
The floor of Mattock’s bakehouse had been sinking for eleven years, and Mattock had been not mentioning it for ten and a half.
“It’s only the one corner,” he said.
Peg Hollis crouched, put her palm flat on the flagstones, and did not say anything. The corner in question had gone down by the better part of four inches, which was four inches more than a corner is supposed to go down, and it had taken the north oven with it. The oven now leaned, companionably, into the wall. The wall had opinions about this that were visible from the street.
“Eleven years,” she said.
“Ten.”
“Eleven. You told the Guild ten and a half and you’d been not telling them for six months before that.” She stood, and her knees made a noise she chose to ignore, because she was thirty-nine and had started this trade at thirty-one and every single joint in her body had opinions about that too. “Mattock, if this had come in eleven years ago it’d have been a morning’s work and a pot of ale.”
“And what is it now?”
“Now it’s a proper job.”
Mattock made the face every client makes at the words proper job — the particular betrayal of a man who has just watched a morning’s work turn into a fortnight’s.
She had the boards up by mid-morning.
Underneath was what she’d expected and hoped not to see: made ground. Somebody, a long time ago, had wanted a flat floor where the river had left a slope, and had achieved this in the traditional manner, which is to say by tipping in whatever was to hand and putting a building on top of it before anyone could argue. Broken tile. Ash. A quantity of oyster shell that suggested somebody had had a very good century. It had been settling ever since, patiently, the way made ground does, and it would go on settling long after Mattock and his ovens and his grandchildren were gone.
Peg sat back on her heels and addressed the hole.
“Morning,” she said.
Nothing happened, which was correct. You don’t get an answer to the first one. The first one is just letting them know somebody’s turned up.
She unrolled her kit — the good chalk, the little brass level, the plumb her master had given her when she qualified and which she had never once admitted was the nicest thing she owned — and she set out her marks. Then she sat down properly, with her back against the flour bins, and got out her ledger.
“Right,” she said to the hole. “Hollis. Journeywoman, ground trades, sealed under Corven of Heorth, which I’ll grant you isn’t much of a recommendation but it’s the one I’ve got.” She licked her pencil. “I’m going to want the south-east corner held. Not lifted — I’m not asking for lifted, I know what lifted costs. Held. And I’d want it held about nine years, which is what I reckon the wall’s got in it.”
The hole said nothing.
“Now,” Peg said, “I can’t pay Guild scale. Neither can Mattock, and before you say it, I know he’s got the money, but he’s also got a daughter getting married in the spring and I’d rather not be the reason that goes badly.” She wrote as she talked. “So what I’ve got is this. Whoever’s owed for this job goes in the book. Under their own mark. Drawn how it’s drawn, not how I’d guess it. And it goes in my book, which stays with me, not into Corven’s account where it turns into ‘the Heorth folk, various’ by quarter-day.”
Something under the floor shifted its weight. It was not a large sound. It was the sound of somebody who had been leaning against a doorframe deciding to stand up straight.
That’s not nothing, said a voice from somewhere near the oyster shells.
“No,” Peg agreed. “It’s not nothing. It’s also not scale, and I’d be an idiot to pretend otherwise.”
You would. A pause. Woman came through here in my grandfather’s day. Sealed. Very fine hat. The voice was entirely without emphasis, which was how she knew to be careful. Told us what she was offering was better than scale. Used a lot of the same words you’re using.
Peg kept her hand flat on the stone and did not, in any way, hurry.
“And was it?”
No.
“No,” said Peg. “Right.” She sat with that for a moment. “Then I’ll not tell you mine’s better. Mine’s worse, it’s the whole of what there is, and the only thing I’ve got that she hadn’t is that I’ll be the one back here in nine years to hear about it.”
That’s the part we’d be taking on faith.
“It is.”
We’ve taken worse on faith. Something shifted its weight in the dark. Rarely well.
“I’d rather tell you what it is than dress it up,” Peg said, “and then we’d both be standing here knowing I’d dressed it up.”
There was a pause. Peg had learned about the pauses. Everybody new to the trade thought the pause meant they’d said the wrong thing, and hurried to fill it, and that was how you ended up promising things you couldn’t deliver to people who would remember for four hundred years. The pause didn’t mean anything. The pause was just a room full of people not in a hurry.
Nine years, the voice said eventually. Short. Something that was not quite amusement. We held this corner before there was a bakehouse on it. Before there was a street. I’d not call nine years a length of time, lass, but I’ll grant it’s a length of yours.
“It is,” said Peg. “It’s about a fifth of it.”
Aye. A pause. That’s why I’ll take it.
“…Right.”
Peg turned the chalk over in her fingers. “You’d have seen the old bridge go, then. The stone one.”
Before my time.
“Before your—” She stopped. “How far back does yours go?”
Far enough to know the shape of this bank and not much past it, said the voice, with the flat patience of somebody being asked about a place they have never been. We’re a corner, lass. We’re not the world.
“Fair.”
People always think we’re the world. Something that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. It’ll want doing again.
“And I’d like it to be me that does it, and I’d like it to be you I’m asking. So let’s neither of us make that difficult” Peg said.
Another pause, of a different quality.
Get your chalk, then, lass.
It took until the light went.
She did the thing properly, because there was no other way she knew how to do it: she went round the whole floor on her hands and knees with the chalk, marking the load lines, and she talked the entire time. Not chatter — she’d been taught the difference by a master who had been merciless about it. Chatter is noise. Talking is telling people what you are about to do to their house before you do it.
The oven was another matter, and she left it till last because she had been putting it off.
The corner under the floor had desnity and a voice, and somebody to do the talking. What lived in Mattock’s oven had none of those and never would — one wick, one firebox, nobody to speak for it, and nothing in the trade that told you what to do about that. You could not put an offer to it. It could not have taken one.
So she did what Corven had done in front of her, which was to kneel at the firebox and say it out loud anyway, in the order it would happen, to something that could not answer and might not be attending.
“Oven comes out,” she said. “Oven goes back. Same bricks, same place. And I’ll have the flue swept while it’s down. That’s the whole of it.” She sat back on her heels. “I’ll not pretend it’s a favour.”
The fire did what fires do, which is nothing, in a manner open to several readings.
It had been drawing crooked for eleven years. In eleven years nobody had said one word to it about anything at all, including the man whose bread it made every morning of his life.
By full dark the corner was held, the oven was propped, and Mattock was standing in his own doorway looking at a bill that was, in his professional opinion, an outrage.
“That’s more than the morning’s work and a pot of ale,” he said.
“It is.”
“By some distance.”
“By eleven years,” said Peg, “and about four inches.”
Mattock looked at the bill for a while longer. Then he went inside and came back with a loaf, still warm, from the good oven, the one that wasn’t leaning.
“That’s not payment,” he said.
“No.”
“That’s just a loaf.”
“It is,” Peg agreed, and took it, because you take the loaf. She’d been taught that too.
[ALT, undecided] “It is,” Peg agreed, and took it, without any fuss, which was something she had learnt rather than been taught.
She walked home along the river with it inside her coat, and it was the warmest she’d been all day. The Astar went past on her left, doing what it always did, in the dark, without being asked.
The house was cold and there were three of the children still up, which meant she was going to lose an argument in about four minutes. She put the loaf on the table and hung her coat and got the ledger out to write the day up properly while it was still in her hands, because a job written up next morning is a job written up wrong.
The mark, copied out of the chalk still sitting on the flag by the ovens: drawn the way they had guided her, and not the way she would have guessed at it. That had taken longer than the measuring and mattered a good deal more. She went over the third stroke twice, it being the one she was least sure of.
Then, at the bottom, in the little column she kept for herself and had never shown anybody:
Nine years. Mattock’s. Ask for the same folk.
“Mam,” said Tal, from the stairs, in the voice of a child who has been saving something up. “There’s a letter come for Wren.”
Peg did not look up immediately. She finished the line she was on. A line left half-written is a line rewritten.
“From where?”
“The Office.”
“Which office?”
“The Office,” said Tal, with enormous satisfaction. “The one in the town. With the door. It had a capitol seal!”
Peg put her pencil down.
Somewhere above her, through the floor, she could hear her eldest son not moving — the specific, held, ringing stillness of a nineteen-year-old sitting very quietly on the edge of a bed with a piece of paper in his hands.
Nobody official had ever written to him before. She had been nineteen once with a letter from the Guild in her own hands, and she knew precisely what he was doing up there: reading it again in case it said the thing he was afraid of, and then going back through six months of his own work looking for the mistake.
Hers had been about a fee. She had lost two nights over it.
She did not go up. He would come down when he had worked out how to say it without making it hers, and that would take a while, there being nothing in it to say.
She looked at the ceiling for a moment.
Then she picked up the pencil and finished the job properly, which meant the part she had not done yet: what was owed, and what Mattock would be sending against the mark — ale and bread, valued and listed — and the day it had to be at the church by.
The date came out heavier than the rest, pressed hard enough to score the page beneath, and she did not go back and neaten it.