Chapter One: The Cold Wind Chest

St. Osyth’s had been a wool exchange’s chapel before it was a Methodist one, and a Methodist one before it was nothing at all, and by the time Nell Kerrigan let herself in with the key the trust had left under a loose flagstone, it had been nothing at all for longer than she’d been alive. The nave smelled of wet plaster and mouse and, underneath that, faintly, of beeswax, which meant someone had polished the pews within the last decade without ever getting around to touching the instrument they were built to face.

The organ took up the whole west end, a dark case of oak gone silver at the edges where damp had wicked up through the wall behind it. Thirty-one stops, according to the specification the trust had emailed her, though the specification had been typed by someone who had clearly never opened the case, because when Nell climbed the ladder behind the pipework with her torch between her teeth she found a rank of open flutes that didn’t appear on any drawknob, tucked behind the great diapasons like a second, smaller confession nobody had thought to record.

She was still up there, notebook wedged against her knee, when a voice below her said, “You’re standing on the reservoir.”

She was not standing on the reservoir. She was standing on the walkway beside it, which she explained, coming down the ladder rung by rung with the particular contempt she reserved for men who introduced themselves with a correction. He was younger than she’d expected from his emails — she’d pictured someone with a beard and a clipboard and the settled, patient malice of every heritage officer she’d ever worked under — and he had, instead, the look of someone who had been up since five doing something more physically demanding than architecture, which, as it turned out, he had.

“Julian Ferro,” he said, and did not offer his hand, because both of hers were full of torch and notebook and a chisel she’d forgotten she was holding. “I did the structural survey. And the roof. And I’m fairly sure I signed off on your contract, so, for what it’s worth, welcome.”

“Nell Kerrigan,” she said. “For what it’s worth, your organ’s dying of the roof you signed off on.”

It wasn’t a fair thing to say — the roof had been failing since long before Julian Ferro had anything to do with St. Osyth’s, and the water damage that had killed two ranks of pipework outright had almost certainly happened during the chapel’s twelve fallow years as an unheated storage annex for a furniture auctioneer — but she said it anyway, because she had driven four hours with a boot full of voicing knives to look at an instrument the trust’s own paperwork described as *largely intact*, and largely intact was doing a tremendous amount of work in that sentence.

He didn’t rise to it, which she found more annoying than if he had. He walked the length of the console instead, trailing two fingers along the keyboard’s yellowed ivories without pressing them, the way you’d touch the hand of someone sedated.

“The board wants a decision by March,” he said. “Full restoration, tracker action and all, or we go electronic — a digital instrument voiced to sample the original stops, installed in six weeks, and this case gets kept as a shell because it’s listed and we’re not allowed to gut it entirely. I’ve seen the quotes for both. I know which one I’d rather sign.”

“And which one’s that.”

“I didn’t say I’d get my way. I said I know which one I’d rather sign.” He looked up at the facade pipes, the great burnished mouths of the principal rank catching what little light came through the boarded clerestory. “I need someone to tell me, honestly, whether this thing is worth the six months and the money it’ll take to prove it. Not whether it’s beautiful. I can see that it’s beautiful. Whether it’s *recoverable*.”

Nell set the chisel down on the console lid, which she knew, even as she did it, was the kind of small proprietary gesture that told a client you intended to be difficult. “Give me a week with the wind chests before you ask me that.”

“You’ve got until Friday.”

“I’ve got until the wood tells me something, Mr. Ferro, and wood doesn’t watch a calendar.”

He almost smiled at that — she caught the corner of it before he suppressed it, the way you’d catch a draft under a door before you found where it was coming from — and said, “Julian’s fine,” and left her alone with thirty-one stops, one unrecorded rank, and a reservoir that when she finally got the old hand pump moving let out a long, exhausted groan of trapped air, like something that had been holding its breath for longer than was good for it and had, at last, been asked to let it go.

She worked until the light went, cataloguing dead pipes by touch, and did not think about him again until she was back in the flat above the ironmonger’s that the trust was paying for, eating cold soup out of the tin, and found herself wondering what kind of man signed a contract for an organ he’d never asked to hear played.