Thick black beams held up the mantel, and more thick beams braced the chimney where it went through the ceiling. The black wood was split and cracked, and in the cracks, thin pieces of metal were wedged like studs. Most were black with soot or green with age. But a few still gleamed silvery and coppery, and I could see they were coins: the ones in the front of the mantel looked like pennies and tuppences. Others were wedged so far into the wood and so discolored that you couldn’t tell what they were, or how old.

It was a bit unsettling. It gave me the same chill as the limekilns, and I didn’t know why.

The knobbly, uneven column holding up the low ceiling at the corner of the bar was another tree trunk, painted black, like the tree trunks holding up the porch outside. It was also studded with coins, though not as many. And there were more coins in the black beam that crossed above the bar. All those gleamed, as if someone buffed them regularly with vinegar and salt. They looked like modern sixpences and shillings.

I ran my fingertips over the pennies in the mantel. That’s what I was doing when Nancy Campbell came out through a door behind the bar.

“That’s dead men’s money,” she snapped. “Leave it.”

“Of course no one’s altering your decorations, Nancy,” said Jane tartly.

I took my hand away and, though I was probably more annoyed than Jane at the idea I might be mining for gold in the mantelpiece, I gritted my teeth and bit my tongue again, determined not to create a stir on my first day. Also, I was curious about the coins.

“Dead men’s money?” I repeated.

In fact Mrs. Campbell was busting to talk about it. She was just so tight-lipped she didn’t know how to start a conversation politely.

“The wood in here is all from a wishing tree. It’s older than the Limehouse,” she said. “Folk made wishes on it for hundreds of years before it fell. There were pennies in the tree when this place was built, two hundred and fifty years ago. Then the airmen from the last war put their coppers in the mantel for safekeeping before they went on a mission.”

She gestured toward the pennies I’d touched.

“Those lads would put in a tuppenny bit and after a flight they’d take it out and buy a pint. All these still in the wood are airmen who never came back. Dead men’s money,” repeated Nancy Campbell. “Wishes that didn’t come true. My lads. Same age as me in the last lot.”

She pointed.

“That one was Cammy McBride. Cheeky daredevil with green eyes. I pulled his last pint. It was a reconnaissance flight—he got caught in the clouds. And that was Ben Knox. His engine failed on a training flight. Just up there—”