“By my good eye, I will, then,” Jacob said.
“My sister and I escaped the convent with the help of two Indians. She married one of them and left me at the field behind the Boynes’s house.”
Cullah smiled and said, “Oh. Well and aye, then. I feared you were going to say she married some English cod.” Both men laughed. “Do you have wood stock with which to fix this?”
“No, sir. Goody Carnegie—”
“Ah! That one’s gone afey,” said Jacob. “She’s known far and wide.”
“You know her, then?” I asked. “Well, when she is in her mind, she is not daft at all. She has offered me this house as long as I intend to stay. She is not fey.”
Cullah closed his lids slowly, as if sleep had come upon him as I spoke; when he opened them, he said, “So you answer one question with a reply to another.”
“I meant no falseness by it,” I said. “I was beginning to answer but taking a long way around it. My only means is her generosity and the weaving I plan to do.”
Jacob said, “We’ve rightly got better manners than has been shown, Miss Talbot. We have been already well paid. We’ll work the fair amount of it for you as whatever suits your fancy, and improves this house. The boy here is not much good at felling so it goes to me to bring down the trees for your work, but he turns a fine table leg.”
“Really, sir, I need no work.”
Jacob raised himself from the table and, using one finger, flicked crumbs of wood from the very beam on which I had stacked my coins. From his bag he pulled an iron hammer. With a mighty swing he sank the head of it into the beam. “Rotten to the core,” he said. “Been thatched, aye? But the wight that thatched it did nothing to replace the rotted beams. Let me look a bit. Aye. Aye. Well, there won’t be a tower for fifty pound, but we’ll do what we can for you. Replace the rot. Make ’er sound.”
Jacob seemed to be measuring with his hands, his lips moving soundlessly. After great length, he said, “It will take a month. That’s without fixtures or furnishings, you understand, but we’ll fit what we can for cupboard and larder.”
Perhaps this was something I could do in return for Goody having allowed me this house. If Lady Spencer had paid these men to work on it, I could return it to Goody better than I found it. “All right, then. Can this be done without disturbing the loom?”
Jacob studied it. “We build a roof under the beams, at the top posts there. When we take down the thatching, there will be a mess like a haystack turned up, but I can save your work. Then we will put it right, and take down the false roof. It can be done.”
“When will you begin?”
Cullah rose and moved behind his father. He wrenched out the hammer embedded in the beam. Shreds of wood that came with it fell as dust. While I knew little of wood and its crafting, I knew a beam was not supposed to powder. “We just began,” he said.
Outside, they opened their boxes of tools, axes, and blades of all types. While they made a survey of the land for suitable trees, I collected my coins. I saw them looking at the enormous beech that overshadowed part of the yard, but I asked them to leave it. I went for Goody’s home, to tell her of this news. She returned with me, abeam with joy. She claimed that my coming had brought her more luck and then some. She pointed them toward the woods that stood on her land, and said they could use what they needed there.
In just a few hours, they had a shed built within the stone walls that roofed over my loom from anything above, and they began tearing down the thatched roof. The shed was hot as an oven inside, but I worked in it, thankful for it. Then after a time, I found the rhythm of the loom echoed with the rhythm of axes striking the trees. I lost myself in my work, and was startled when Jacob and Cullah came to the place, weary, sweating, and smelling badly, and asked me for some supper. Then both of them laughed and Cullah pulled forth a rabbit he had killed and cleaned.
“I have never cooked a rabbit,” I said.
Over the next weeks, Jacob and Cullah turned my tranquil life into havoc. Every day my work at the loom started with one blessing and I put the shuttles to rest with another. Every day the music of weaving was but a trill above the booming of hammer and peg. The granite walls of this house served now as a foundation, and another, larger house grew atop it like a mushroom. Stairs and another door opened to the world from atop the rise upon which the granite abutment had made a wall below.