The Long Way Back To Warmth

The Ashworth House

The Ashworth estate announced itself before it appeared, the way certain buildings do, not through any particular architectural feature visible from the road but through a kind of gravitational pull in the landscape around it, an insistence in the trees, which grew taller and closer together the nearer the road came to the water, as though the whole point of the last quarter mile had been to make you wait for it.

Deborah drove slowly, partly out of unfamiliarity with the road and partly, she admitted to herself, out of something closer to reverence. She had seen the photographs, of course, dozens of them, in the packet Hartwell & Fen had sent ahead of her interview, high, resolution shots of failing cornices and water-stained plaster ceilings and a widow's walk whose railing had rotted through in six places, alongside older photographs, sepia-toned and formal, of the house in its original glory, when it had belonged to Josiah Ashworth, a shipping magnate whose fortune had been made in a manner the historical society's literature described as "maritime trade" and that Deborah suspected, from the dates involved, had at least brushed up against less savoury categories of Atlantic commerce than the brochure cared to specify. She had read the structural reports. She had read the previous engineer's assessment, three years old now, that used the word "salvageable" four times and the word "if" nine, which she had found, on first reading, either encouraging or ominous depending on her mood that day.

None of the photographs had prepared her for the house itself.

It stood on a rise above the cove, grey-shingled and enormous, three and a half stories of eaves and gables and a round tower room at the northeast corner that had clearly once been someone's pride and was now sheathed in temporary tarping that flapped, forlorn, in the wind off the water. The lawn around it had gone to meadow, waist-high grass moving in slow waves, and a stone wall that had once marked a formal garden had crumbled in three places into piles that looked less like ruin and more like the wall was simply returning, patiently, to the ground it had been quarried from. The whole property had the particular quality of grand things left too long without attention, not squalor exactly, but a kind of dignified exhaustion, a house that had been holding its own posture upright for longer than anyone had helped it, and was beginning, in specific and locatable places, to fail.

She parked at what had clearly once been a circular drive and got out, and stood for a moment simply looking up at it, the way she did with every building at the start of every job, before she let herself think about jambs and joists and moisture content. You had to look at a building first as a whole thing, she'd learned early in her training, before you let yourself see it as a problem. Otherwise you started solving before you understood what you were solving for, and old buildings punished that kind of hurry more consistently than almost anything else she knew.

"You're early," said a voice behind her, and she turned to find a woman about her own age crossing the meadow-lawn from a battered pickup Deborah hadn't noticed, dressed in canvas work pants and carrying a clipboard like a shield. "Which I appreciate. Nobody's ever early to this house. Ruth Calloway, site coordinator for the trust." She had a handshake like a plumber's wrench, firm past the point of necessity, and eyes that did a fast, competent inventory of Deborah head to foot in the two seconds before she smiled, an assessment Deborah recognized because she did the same thing herself, on people and on buildings both. "You must be the timber specialist. Hartwell said you'd be either terrifyingly overqualified or a disaster. For your sake I'm hoping overqualified."

"I try to be overqualified whenever possible," Deborah said. "It's cheaper than therapy."

Ruth barked a short laugh, genuine, and something in Deborah's shoulders came down half an inch, the particular relief of discovering, in a new place, that at least one person present might turn out to be someone you liked. "Come on, then," Ruth said. "I'll walk you through what we've got, and then I'll walk you through what we're afraid of, which is a longer list."

The interior of the house was worse and better than Deborah had expected, in the way interiors of old, wounded buildings always were worse because water damage always looked more catastrophic in person than in a photograph, the stains spreading across ceilings like continents on some ruined atlas, the smell of old wet plaster and mouse and something faintly sweet that was probably mold and that she'd have to test for before anyone did serious work in the east wing; and better because underneath the damage, in the bones of the place, she could already see what three separate contractors had apparently missed or given up looking for, real quality. Hand-cut mortise and tenon joints in the main hall's framing, visible where a section of lath and plaster had come down entirely and exposed the skeleton beneath. A staircase whose newel post was carved with a level of care that spoke of a craftsman who had been paid, and had also simply wanted it to be beautiful, those two motives being not always the same thing. She ran her hand along the banister without thinking about it, an old habit, feeling for the specific give and grain of wood that had been loved once, badly wounded since, and was, she thought, standing in the wrecked and beautiful main hall of the Ashworth house with dust moving gold in a shaft of light from a broken window, probably still salvageable. Probably, if someone was patient, if someone understood what a hundred and forty years of weather actually did to structural timber, as opposed to what people assumed it did.

"The tower's the worst of it," Ruth said, leading her toward the northeast corner. "Whoever built this place had opinions about turrets he probably shouldn't have acted on. It's been closed off since a chunk of the roof came down two winters back. We lost the last engineer over it, he wanted to demo the whole thing and rebuild from scratch as a 'compatible reproduction,' which is, tearing the actual history out and putting up a Halloween decoration in its place. The trust said absolutely not, he quit, and here we are, four months behind and one specialist short, which is you."

"I'd want to get up in the tower before I promise you anything," Deborah said. "Some of that structural stuff you can't assess from photographs. You have to put a hand on it. Sometimes literally smell it."

"That's what the last guy said before he told us to bulldoze it."

"I'm not the last guy."

Ruth looked at her for a moment with the same fast assessment as before, and this time the smile that followed it was slower, and seemed to mean more. "No," she said. "I don't think you are." She flipped a page on her clipboard. "There's someone I want you to meet, actually, before you go up there. Not trust business, well, sort of trust business. John Kessler. He's been doing some of the exterior stabilization work on contract, mostly boat repair skills applied to a very large, very stationary boat, which is more or less what this house has become structurally. He knows the building better than anyone alive at this point, better than the trust does, honestly, he's been out here two years on and off. He's a little —" Ruth paused, choosing a word with visible care. "He's a little private. But he's good. You'll want him on your side before you're done here, so I'd get that started early."

"Where do I find him?"

"Boathouse, most days. Down past the seawall." Ruth pointed with her clipboard toward a squat grey structure Deborah could just see through a gap in the meadow grass, sitting at the edge of the cove where the property's private dock, half-collapsed, reached out into water the colour of hammered pewter under the overcast sky. "Fair warning. He doesn't do small talk, doesn't mean anything by it, just walks straight past it, like it's a room in a house he's decided not to furnish." Ruth smiled again, this time with something almost fond in it. "You'll see."

Deborah looked down the slope of ruined lawn toward the boathouse, its grey shingles a shade darker than the house's, weathered by the same hundred and forty years of the same salt wind, and felt the particular, quiet interest she reserved for things she suspected would turn out to be more complicated than they first appeared old buildings, mostly, up until now. She had not expected the feeling to extend, on her first morning, to a man she hadn't yet met.

"I'll head down after I've seen the tower," she said. "Structural first, People after."

"That's the correct order of operations for this job," Ruth said, "in my professional opinion." And she led Deborah back into the ruined, beautiful hall, toward the narrow stairs that climbed, dark and creaking, into the wounded turret above.