Chapter One
The Half Painted Board
The tower of St. Maur's had been silent for a month when Eleanor Finch first climbed it, and a silent tower, she had found in twenty years of the trade, is never quite silent. It ticks. The frame settles, the ropes breathe damp and dry, the bells hang in the dark overhead like eight patient thoughts, and the whole stone shaft holds its centuries the way a shell holds the sea.
She had come up alone with a torch and a clipboard, the first survey of the winter's work, and she had got no further than the ringing chamber.
The chamber was a museum that did not know it was one. Eight ropes hung in their circle, sallies faded to the colour of old strawberries. Peal boards lined the walls in the usual way, black and gold, a century and a half of the tower's proudest afternoons lettered by long dead signwriters: dates, methods, names, the word COMPLETED in triumphant capitals at the foot of each.
Except one.
It hung between the window and the clock case, and it was wrong in a way that took her a moment to parse, the way a stopped clock is wrong. The border was gilded, the heading lettered: A PEAL OF GRANDSIRE TRIPLES, 5040 CHANGES, ATTEMPTED AT THIS TOWER 26 DECEMBER 1974. The eight names were lettered below, each with its bell. And there the letters stopped. No time. No COMPLETED. The lower third of the board was blank, primed white and never painted, and the blankness had hung there so long it had a colour of its own now, the ivory of fifty winters, and it was the loudest thing in the room.
