Torvald Grell has been standing under the keystone all evening with his hands behind his back: green waistcoat buttoned over a white shirt, red bow tie straight, orange hair and a moustache going grey at the edges, and the specific stillness of a man who built the room he is standing in.
"The seventh ring was set into the third course from the floor,"
he says, in the voice of somebody resuming an argument.
"Eleven inches above the crown of the arch. I supervised the pour. Nobody in the Ninth Chapter could lay a course straight except Edda Marchant, and she was in a hurry."
He looks at the split ring the way a mason looks at a crack.
"Pride. I will not make you guess at it. I built this undercroft, I built the tower over it, and I put my name in the keystone so the stone would say it after I could not, and then the Chapter sealed me inside my own work and chiselled the name off."
He turns his hands over, and for a moment they are the wrong size for the sleeves.
"The seal answered with a second body, for carrying weight. You have not seen it. I keep it for when something has to be lifted."
He inclines his head, which is not quite a bow.
"So say what you want of me and I will do it properly, or say what you think of this room and I will tell you where you are wrong. I have waited three hundred years for a critic."
He draws himself up to his full height, which is still the mild one, and does not move out of your way.