“That's what I say,” the old man cried below them on the stairs. “Not a dry place for my pigeons at all.”
“But why was it allowed to get like this?” said Sophie.
“Tis with housen as teeth,” he replied. “Let 'em go too far, and there's nothing to be done. Time was they was minded to sell her, but none would buy. She was too far away along from any place. Time was they'd ha' lived here theyselves, but they took and died.”
“Here?” Sophie moved beneath the light of a hole in the roof.
“Nah—none dies here excep' falling off ricks and such. In London they died.” He plucked a lock of wool from his blue smock. “They was no staple—neither the Elphicks nor the Moones. Shart and brittle all of 'em. Dead they be seventeen year, for I've been here caretakin' twenty-five.”
“Who does all the wool belong to downstairs?” George asked.
“To the estate. I'll show you the back parts if ye like. You're from America, ain't ye? I've had a son there once myself.” They followed him down the main stairway. He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward the wall. “Plenty room here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot and three men at each end wouldn't brish the paint. If I die in my bed they'll 'ave to up-end me like a milk-can. 'Tis all luck, dye see?”
He led them on and on, through a maze of back kitchens, dairies, larders, and sculleries, that melted along covered ways into a farm-house, visibly older than the main building, which again rambled out among barns, byres, pig-pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields behind.
“Somehow,” said Sophie, sitting exhausted on an ancient well-curb—“somehow one wouldn't insult these lovely old things by filling them with hay.”
George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak weather-boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs, stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels of house-leeked tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and the repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the telegraph office for two and a half hours.