Chapter 12: The Billed Room

The kitchen stood in an old doorway off the outer hall, a storage niche the dungeon had kept for itself since before the Mercers. Its lintel was dark original stone. Its floor had worn into a dish under a century of sacks. Bram's runners had walled the niche in with cellar brick, and the new courses gave off a smell of lime and old herring brine. "Two hundred and forty," Bram said. He sat on an upturned bucket with his splinted hand propped on his knee. "Every one shaken loose by the flood, every one given. That brick has carried cellars through three winters and never complained. I have thanked eleven landladies." "Show me the hearth wall," Ilan said. The joints were pencil lines of lime between brick and brick, and between brick and the old wall. Lime would not hold a fire. Under heat the courses would work against…