“And the landlady, Mrs. Linney, she’s agreed?”
“Yes, although I suspect she’ll be watching us like a hawk,” Jonah said. “Though I may have, uh, helped her to feel that she can trust us. Just a bit. Well, she can. Neither of us will be pouncing on Bethany, will we?”
“Who’s Bethany?”
“The older daughter. There’s a smaller one called Agnes.”
“Right. Right.” Ben didn’t give a damn about daughters. All he could see was Jonah, with that open, hopeful look in his eyes, coming up with a proposition of honest work, and a chance for them to rest at last, somewhere safe.
Obviously, he ought to be leaving. He’d decided that. But he needed rest and food and time to recover, and he could always go later.
Mrs. Linney did keep a close eye on them, but she was as good as her word with clothing. She lent them garments belonging to her deceased husband—rough, baggy things a little short on Ben and a little long on Jonah, but serviceable—and took their own clothes off for sorely needed cleaning, and Ben immersed himself in physical tasks. There was plenty to do. The old inn had been deteriorating for years, he guessed, struggling to keep the dwindling clientele who were probably put off by its shabbiness.
He loved working with his hands, though, and was a talented carpenter. Mr. Linney had had a good store of tools, and Ben eyed up the chairs and tables that needed a bit of mending with the pleasant anticipation of something useful to be done. There were days of vital work here, in his estimation, more like months of upkeep.
Jonah was predictably unacquainted with a chisel. He did, however, know what to do with the chickens and the pigs, somewhat to Ben’s surprise, and cheerfully obeyed Bethany’s orders in the vegetable patch.
By noon, when Mrs. Linney provided an excellent lunch of rabbit pie with a jug of home-brewed ale, Ben was pleasantly conscious of sore muscles and a good morning’s work done by both. Flighty Jonah, working. He tried not to let himself believe too hard in that.
“You’re a wonderful cook, Mrs. Linney.” Jonah swallowed a mouthful of pie. “I haven’t eaten so well in weeks.”
She accepted the compliment as her due, but made a wry face. “Better cook than landlady. Baking and brewing, that’s easy enough. The rest…well, it ain’t the employment I’d have chosen.”
Ben believed that. She was stern-faced, silent, not a welcoming presence even when she smiled. It didn’t create the sort of atmosphere that would drive the men of Pellore up the steep hill, except that this was the only inn for miles. Even so, custom was sparse.
“Why do you run it?” he asked.
“It was Linney’s. Now it’s mine, and in time it will be my daughters’.” She nodded at Bethany, who ate with them. “Linney left us nothing else, and he’d let it go to rack and ruin as it was. Mebbe I should have sold it when he died, but old Linney loved this place, my father-in-law, and I thought I could make something of it, for the girls’ sake. Well.” Her weather-marked face was lined with weariness, and Ben, watching it, realised with a shock that she was much younger than he’d thought last night, probably less than forty.
“You’ve done your best, Ma,” Bethany put in. “Tain’t your fault there’s no more’n twenty-four hours in a day. You’d have us working more if there was.”
“None of your cheek.” Mrs. Linney gave her daughter a severe look. “Well, we keep on, and it’s good to have some help.”
“For a meal this good, you may have all the help your heart could wish,” Jonah assured her, with his glorious smile.
“Tackle the chimney if you’re that grateful,” Mrs. Linney retorted, but it was clear she was holding back a smile of her own.
After they had eaten and the women had gone to the kitchen, Ben went to have a look at the chimney. “It must be blocked,” he said, squinting fruitlessly up into the dark. “I suppose we could try rods. I’d rather leave it to a sweep, honestly.”
Jonah sauntered over to the great hearth. “Let me have a look?”
Ben moved back but Jonah didn’t attempt to look up the flue, instead putting his hand on the stone of the chimney, over the black beam of the mantelpiece. His eyes lost focus, the pupils widening.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Um…there’s something—broken. Sticks. A nest, I think. And something dead. Cat?” Jonah mumbled the words to himself, staring at nothing. Ben took a step back, the hairs on his forearms rising. “It’s very…solid… Ooh, there you are, that’s it— Bollocks.”