Tonight the Stairs Will Hold

By the time the light in Tavi's workshop turned the color of weak tea, the rain had begun to tap at the boarding house like a patient visitor who had forgotten what time it was. He bent over a half-soled boot, drew the waxed thread through leather with steady hands, and listened to the house breathe above him: a kettle singing on the second floor, a door latch clicking, somebody laughing softly over supper. The building was narrow and tall, stitched together around an outdoor stair that climbed past the windows like a ladder someone had decided to make elegant. Tavi liked boots better than stairs. Boots were honest. They only asked to be fed scraps of leather and a clean heel, and in return they carried people where they meant to go. Stairs, by contrast, were forever developing opinions. Mottle, the boarding house cat, was curled on a stack of off-cuts beside the stove, watching him with the severe expression of a judge who had been denied a nap. Tavi flicked a look at her. ‘If you’re going to supervise, at least look useful,’ he muttered. Mottle blinked once, as if to say that usefulness was beneath her dignity. Rain thickened against the window. A gust slipped under the door and brought with it the smell of wet stone, onion soup, and Mrs. Calder's clove cake cooling somewhere upstairs. The house had a habit of smelling like everyone's life at once. Tavi set the boot aside and reached for the next one, but before he could start the new seam, a low creak rolled through the stair outside. Not the ordinary complaint of old wood. Something longer. Tired. He paused, listening. Another creak answered, then the soft, uncertain thump of water hitting a loose board. Tavi frowned, wiped his hands on his apron, and told himself that old buildings always sounded dramatic in bad weather. Still, he did not enjoy the way the stair had begun to speak.

He was not in the habit of meddling when a problem belonged to the weather, but the rain had a way of making every small thing look more urgent than it wanted to be. Tavi opened the workshop door a crack and peered into the corridor. The lower landing was dim, lit by one lamp with a smoky wick and the warm square of light under the kitchen door. Beyond that, the outside stair ran upward in a straight, exposed line, each step slick with rain, each railing bead-covered and shining. Mrs. Calder stood at the top of the first flight in a shawl the color of beet skins, holding a tin bucket under a drip that had found the exact center of the stair beam. She saw him and gave the bucket an annoyed little shake. ‘If that drip gets any more determined, I shall charge it rent,’ she said. ‘You would charge a raindrop rent?’ Tavi asked. ‘Certainly. It would only be fair if it occupied the landing all evening.’ She adjusted the shawl at her shoulders and peered down at him. ‘You hear that board complaining too, or have I finally become a nuisance to myself?’ Tavi looked up at the stair and then down at her bucket. ‘I hear both, which is never a cheerful combination.’ She made a face that was almost a smile. A tiny figure in striped stockings appeared behind her, one hand on the rail, the other clutching a bun nearly as large as the child's face. Pip, the youngest of the upper-floor tenants, had the unstoppable energy of a spring kettle. ‘Tavi,’ Pip called, ‘is the rain winning?’ ‘For the moment, yes,’ he said. ‘It has the unfair advantage of falling from the sky.’ ‘Rude of it,’ Pip declared. Mottle slipped past Tavi's ankles and sat squarely on the threshold as if she had come to inspect the weather herself. The cat's tail twitched once. Tavi bent to retrieve her, but then the stair gave another long, wet groan, and he straightened instead, all amusement draining out of him. That was not a good sound.