Chapter Two: Nicking

By the second week, Julian had taken to bringing two coffees up the ladder instead of one, which was either courtesy or reconnaissance, and Nell had stopped pretending she minded either possibility.

The unrecorded rank turned out to be a set of stopped wooden flutes, twelve of them, hidden behind the diapason facade in a section of chest that didn’t match the rest of the layout — added later, she guessed, sometime after the original 1891 build, by someone who either hadn’t had the budget for a proper case extension or hadn’t wanted anyone to know the rank was there at all. She found the maker’s mark by accident, running her thumb along the underside of the largest pipe to check for split seams, and felt before she saw it: initials cut into the lead with a blade, not stamped, the way a builder marks his own private work rather than his firm’s official output. *E.H.* A date, half worn away. *18—3.*

“Somebody built these off the books,” she told Julian, holding the pipe up to the torchlight so he could see the scratch marks from the ladder below. “Look at the cut-up on the mouth — too high for a stock flute, somebody was voicing these for a particular room. This is a gift, or it’s a grudge. Nobody hides good work unless they’ve got a reason.”

“Maybe he just ran out of drawknobs,” Julian said, which was the sort of practical answer she was starting to expect from him and, increasingly, to enjoy arguing with.

“Maybe,” she agreed, “but I’d put money on the gift.”

She spent that afternoon voicing the rank back into the chest — not restoring the whole instrument yet, just this one hidden confession of a rank, because she wanted, badly and without being able to explain why, to hear what E.H. had built. Voicing was slow work and had always struck her as the closest thing her trade had to conversation: you shaved a fraction of tin from the upper lip of a pipe’s mouth, you nicked the languid with two shallow cuts to steady the tone, you blew across it with the bellows pump and listened, and if it spoke wrong you took a little more, or a little less, and you did this until the pipe said the thing it was built to say and not some compromised, mumbling version of it.

Julian worked the hand pump for her because the electric blower wasn’t reconnected yet, standing below the walkway with his sleeves pushed up, and somewhere around pipe nine he said, without looking up, “My father was a stonemason. Restoration work, mostly — churches, bridges, the odd war memorial. He used to say the whole job was learning to shut up long enough to hear what the stone already wanted to be.”

“Sounds like a man who talked a lot about shutting up.”

“He did,” Julian said, and there was something in the way he said it — past tense worn smooth, the particular flatness of a grief handled so many times it no longer had sharp edges left to catch on — that made her set down the voicing knife.

“When?”

“Four years. Cancer, it took eleven months, which everyone agreed was mercifully fast, which is an obscene thing to say about eleven months, but there it is.” He kept pumping, steady, unhurried, and she understood that the rhythm was doing something for him that talking wasn’t. “I do this now partly because he’d have hated me doing anything else. I don’t know if that’s grief or vocation. I’ve stopped trying to separate them.”

She thought of her own father, twenty years a voicer before her, whose knives she still used, whose handwriting was still in the margins of the trade manuals stacked in her van, and did not say any of that yet, because some things you didn’t hand over on a Tuesday afternoon to a man you’d known twelve days. Instead she picked up pipe nine, set it back on its toe board, and said, “Pump.”

He pumped. She blew the pipe. It spoke — a fluted, wooden, faintly hollow C, the exact plaintive note of something that had been quiet a very long time and hadn’t expected to be asked to speak again — and in the small cold room the sound did something to both of them that neither one commented on, though she noticed he had stopped pumping and simply stood there, listening, his hand still on the lever, for a good deal longer than the bellows needed to empty.

“E.H. knew what he was doing,” Julian said finally.

“E.H. knew who he was doing it for,” Nell said, and immediately wished she hadn’t, because it landed in the room like a thing spoken about the wrong century by accident, and Julian looked up at her on the walkway with an expression she didn’t have a trade term for, and for a moment neither of them moved to fill the silence, which by then had become its own kind of instrument, tuned and waiting.

Then his phone rang — the trust’s project manager, about scaffolding permits — and the moment folded itself away as practically as everything else in that building eventually had to, and Nell went back to pipe ten with hands that were not, she noted with some irritation, entirely steady.