Hearing what it was he was going to do with it though—that had pretty much insured that every Brownie not otherwise occupied on the whole island of Logres turned up to help. One month; that was all it had taken for the Brownies to do their work. One single month. Two months of preparation by him just to give them a place to start, and the one month keeping barely ahead of them. He never would have believed it, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.
He suspected that they had had help as well; Brownies weren’t noted for forge-work, and every bit of ironmongery had been replaced with beautifully crafted bronze and copper. They didn’t do stonework so far as he knew, but every bit of stone was as good or better than new, now. All the wet rot and dry rot—gone. Woodwork, floors, ceilings, roof, all repaired. Every draft, hole and crack, stopped. Chimneys cleaned and mended. Stone and brickwork retucked (and who had done that? Gnomes? Dwarves? Surely not Kobolds—though not all Kobolds were evil-minded and ill-tempered). Slates replaced, stones made whole, vermin vanished. He’d asked one of the fauns how they did it, he’d gotten an odd explanation.
“They remind the house of how it was, when it was new.” Though how one “reminded” a house of anything, much less how that could get it repaired, he could not even begin to imagine. Sometimes the best thing that an Elemental Master could do was to bargain with the Elementals themselves, then step back and allow them to determine how something was accomplished.
All right, none of it was major repair, it was all just little things that would quickly have required major repair if they’d gone on. The problem was, with a mismatched barn like this one, there were a great many of those little things; probably why the original owner hadn’t done anything about them. When the money got tight, it was always the little bits of repair that got put off and forgotten. Tiny leaks in the roof that never gave any trouble became gaping holes, missing slates let in hordes of starlings and daws, cracks widened, wood rotted—then gave way.
Thank heavens I was able to step in before the trickle of small problems turned into a flood of disaster.
He could never have paid to have it all done in the normal way, no one could have. Not even one of those American millionaires who seemed to have pots and pots of money to throw about. It hadn’t been just his doing; every Earth Master he knew had called in favors, once word had gotten around of what he was up to. Bless ‘em, for they’re all going to be doing their own housekeeping for the next ten years, doubtless.
For that was what Brownies usually did; household repair was just part of that. Mind, only the most adamantly Luddite of the Earth Masters still had Brownies about—people who lived in remote cottages built in the Middle Ages, genuine Scottish crofters, folk on Lewis and Skye and the hundred tiny islands of the coast. Folk who cooked with copper and bronze pots and implements, and kept—at most—a single steel knife in the house, shielded by layers of silk. Now they would be doing their own cleaning and mending for a time.
And by the time their Brownies returned, they’d probably had gotten used to having Cold Iron about, and all the conveniences and improvements that Cold Iron meant, and the Brownies would never come back to their homes. The price, perhaps, of progress?
Makes one wonder. I cannot even imagine doing without Cold Iron, steel. Well, think of all the screws and nails, the hinges and bits and bobs that are absolutely integral to the building alone! Let alone iron grates in the fireplaces, the stove and implements in the kitchen all the ironmongery in the furniture! It was only this one time, for this one reason, that I was able to. And very nearly not even then. It had been an exhausting three months, and one he hadn’t been entirely certain he would survive.
Already there was so much Cold Iron back in the place that the creatures who were most sensitive couldn’t come within fifty miles. Small wonder few people saw the Oldest Ones anymore, the ones the Celts had called the Sidhe; there was no place “safe” for them on the material plane anywhere near humans.
He drove Pansy around to the stables—ridiculous thing, room for twenty horses and five or six carriages in the carriage house—driving her into the cobblestone courtyard in the center of the carriage house to unharness her, getting her to back up into the gig’s bay so he wouldn’t have to push it into shelter by hand. Another advantage to being an Earth Master, his ability to communicate with animals.
With the gig’s shafts resting on the stone floor of the carriage-bay, he gathered up the long reins so that Pansy wouldn’t trip on them and walked her to her stall in the stables. He supposed it was ridiculous for the chief physician—and owner!—of the sanitarium to be unharnessing and grooming his own horse but—well, there it was, Diccon was still in the manor, probably looking after some other chore that needed a strong back, and he wasn’t going to let Pansy stand about in harness, cold and hungry, just because he was “too good” to do a little manual labor.
And Pansy was a grateful little beast. So grateful that she cheered him completely out of any lingering annoyance with that arrogant Reggie Chamberten.
But how had a girl like that gotten engaged to someone like him? They were, or seemed to be, totally incompatible personalities. Unless it was financial need on her part, or on her familys. Stranger things had happened. Just because one owned a manor, that didn’t mean one was secure in the bank. Look what had happened to Briareley.
He went in through the kitchen entrance—a good, big kitchen, and thanks to the Brownies, all he’d had to do was move in the new cast-iron stove to make it perfect for serving all his patients now, and the capacity to feed the many, many more he hoped to have one day. Right now, he had one cook, a good old soul from the village, afraid of nothing and a fine hand with plain farm fare, who used to cook for the servants here. Red-faced and a little stout, she still moved as briskly as one of her helpers, and she was always willing to fix a little something different, delicate, to tempt a waning appetite among his patients. Helping her were two kitchen maids; a far cry from the days when there had been a fancy French cook for upstairs, a pastry cook, and a cook for downstairs and a host of kitchen maids, scullions, and cleaning staff to serve them.
“Where is Eleanor?” he asked Mrs. Hunter, the cook.
“She’s still with that poor little Ellen, Doctor, but Diccon recks the girl will be all right. He’s took up a hot brick for her bed, and a pot of my good chamomile tea.” Mrs. Hunter beamed at him; she approved of the fact that he took charity patients along with the wealthy ones—and she approved of the fact that he was trying to cure the wealthy ones rather than just warehousing them for the convenience of their relatives. In fact, Mrs. Hunter approved of just about everything he had done here, which had made his acceptance by Oakhurst village much smoother than it would have been otherwise. Not that the folk of Devon were surly or standoffish, oh, much to the contrary, they were amazingly welcoming of strangers! During his early days here, when he’d gotten lost on these banked and hedged lanes time and time again, he’d found over and over that when he asked for directions people would walk away from what they were doing to personally escort him to where he needed to go. Astonishing! So much for the stereotype of the insular and surly cottager.