By the time Ines Reed opened her workshop, Mara had been sitting on the hired handcart for twenty minutes, keeping its bad wheel off the ground with her boot. The bakery opposite had begun selling yesterday’s rolls. She had bought two and eaten the softer one.
“That cart belongs to dispatch,” Ines said, lifting her shutter.
“I’m answerable for it.”
“A popular arrangement. Who pays?”
Mara put three coins on the bench. Ines counted them without picking them up, then wedged the workshop door with a casting that had once been something expensive.
The room smelled of cutting oil and toast. Lift shoes hung in numbered pairs above the bench; a municipal service coat covered the back of a chair. Ines knelt beside the wheel and pulled a length of binding twine from behind its hub.
“That’s some of your trouble.”
“Can you price the rest?”
“On the cart, yes.”
Mara set the remaining roll on a clean corner of the bench. “I need a passage measured. Near Dock Lane.”
“For what installation?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Ines looked up. She had a flat carpenter’s pencil tucked through her hair, holding more of it in place than the comb did.
“Is there a machine at the end of this passage?”
“There’s a door. I need someone who measures things to look at it.”
“A surveyor.”
“Someone who’ll look before consulting the map.”
Ines removed the wheel. Mara waited while she worked, answering questions about where the cart pulled and whether the knocking got worse under load. It was a relief to have answers.
When the wheel ran quietly, Ines wrote a charge beneath Mara’s coins. Then she took a small tally counter from her coat.
“Walking out to inspect an obstruction is another sixpence. Payment before departure.”
Mara added the money she had kept for breakfast tomorrow.
Ines left the counter unclicked. “Good. Those are the visits I like.”
At Wren Passage, a milk carrier had left two bottles against number twelve. Ines set her tool bag clear of them and unfolded a municipal maintenance plan on its lid.
“From twelve’s jamb to the Dock Lane corner: eighteen feet.” She indicated a printed dimension. “That’s the service approach. What’s obstructing it?”
Mara opened the route book. “Tell me what you see first.”
“Brick. Bad pointing. A customer becoming more expensive.”
They stretched Ines’s tape along the wall. Mara held the brass end against the jamb of twelve while Ines read eighteen feet at the corner. With the book open, Mara could see fourteen beside her, yet the tape offered no allowance for its recessed entrance.
“There’s an approach to another door,” Mara said. “Just here.”
Ines put her palm where Mara pointed. “Show me your plan.”
“It’s an old delivery entry.”
“Then show me that.”
Mara almost passed her the book. Instead she asked Ines to read the entry over her wrist. Ines read Tomas’s name and the upper lodging aloud, then looked back at the brick.
“Still a wall?”
“Still a wall.”
From her bag, Ines took a service pad with carbon between its sheets. She copied the address, pressed hard, and lifted the top leaf. The new blue impression was clearer than Mara’s old one.
“Put yours away.”
Mara closed the book. Fourteen disappeared. Ines held the fresh copy against the wall, then walked from twelve to the corner.
“Eighteen feet. No entrance. Are we testing my eyesight or your paperwork?”
“Both, possibly. Borrow mine. The whole book. Please don’t pull out the page.”
Ines wiped her hands on her trousers before taking it.
Holding the book open to the old carbon, Ines stopped with her right foot raised. She lowered it carefully.
“There’s a recess.”
“Yes.”
“And a door. Fourteen.”
Mara saw brick where Ines was looking. She reached toward the book, then let her hand fall.
“Measure it,” she said.
Ines worked one-handed, trapping the tape’s end beneath her tool bag. She followed the accessible wall into the recess and out again, calling the readings while Mara wrote them on the unused back of the new copy.
“Twenty-two feet along the face,” Ines said. “Same endpoints. Four feet of return that I couldn’t reach a minute ago.”
“Could the plan be wrong?”
“The plan didn’t move my hand.”
They exchanged the papers twice more. Each time, the entrance was available to the woman holding the open old book. The fresh carbon gave neither of them access.
Ines stood back on the common paving before returning the book. Mara held it against her ribs for a moment, feeling the bent cover through her coat.
“So it can be lent,” Ines said. “And copying the words this morning doesn’t make another one. That’s what we’ve established. Anything else is extra.”
“I thought you’d say I was tired.”
“You are tired. Hold the tape.”
Before Ines packed her tools, Mara called toward fourteen.
Tomas opened the door in his shirtsleeves. He had flour on one thumb. Mara had to swallow before she could introduce them.
“This is Ines Reed. She’s measured the approach.”
“What approach?” he asked.
Mara explained where he stood, then lent Ines the book again. The mechanic’s gaze shifted and settled on his face.
“Tomas Vale?”
“Yes.”
“Your sister paid for an obstruction inspection.”
He looked past her toward Mara. “She dislikes asking favors.”
Mara watched the blank stretch of wall while they spoke. Hearing him from a place she could no longer find was worse than waiting outside a closed door.
“She’s independent,” Mara said. “I promised.”
“You did.” His voice stayed level. “Thank you for coming, Miss Reed.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything requiring thanks.”
A bakery boy came for the empty bottles and complained that they were blocking twelve. Ines moved her bag. Tomas waited until the boy had gone, then asked Mara whether she had slept.
“Enough to hire someone rude.”
She told him she would return after talking with Ines. The mechanic stepped away from the recess and handed back the route book; Mara saw Tomas close the door.
Receipt fragment 6418 remained in her satchel’s buttoned compartment. She had not shown it to Ines. On the walk back, each time the mechanic asked what had happened to the address, Mara found a smaller question to answer.
A folded notice had been pushed beneath the workshop door. Ines picked it up with the hand holding her keys.
“If that’s another lift inspection,” she said, “you can watch me become unavailable.”
She read it once, then put down the tool bag.
Mara stood beside her at the workshop bench. The notice was headed EAST DISTRICT ACCESS REVIEW. Beneath that, in a box, it read: “BELL FOUNDRY STREET: PENDING REASSIGNMENT.”
“That’s here?” Mara asked.
Ines pointed to the street name painted on her window. The notice gave no reason and no effective date. Questions were to be submitted by the leaseholder.
“My aunt holds the lease. She’ll file this with the rates and say they’d have told us if it mattered.”
Mara took out the receipt fragment and laid it beside the notice, keeping her fingers clear of its number.
“My brother gave me this last night. He says he signed to have his lodging removed.”
Ines read the surviving boxes. “And you paid me to measure brick.”
“I needed you to believe the door first.”
“I believe the door. I’m deciding about the customer.”
Mara pulled out the bench stool and sat. The repaired cart waited by the shutter; she would owe another day’s hire soon.
“What would you charge to help?” she asked.
Ines pushed the stool’s loose foot flat with her boot before Mara could wobble it. “The truth before the job,” she said. “That’s the price. Start with what you left out.”