By February, people started coming to see.
They came quietly at first, in 1s and 2s. Asa Klene brought his neighbor, Tom Harace. Tom Harace told his brother, who told his cousin, who told someone at church. By the end of the month, I had visitors almost every week. They stood in the corridor and felt the air moving past them, warmer than outside, steadier than any stove could make it. They touched the walls and felt the cold, but not killing cold. They looked at me with something new in their eyes. Not belief, not yet, but the beginning of it.
In March, Professor Nathaniel Quarrels came from Lewisburg. He was a science teacher at the academy there, a thin man with spectacles and a notebook and the manner of someone who had spent his life trying to explain things to people who did not want explanations. He had heard about the Ren girl’s cave house from a colleague whose cousin lived in Mercy Crossing. He had traveled 30 miles on bad roads to see whether the stories were true.
I showed him everything: the corridor, the storage alcove, the baffle vent. I let him read Silas’s journals, the ones with the temperature measurements and the smoke tests and the airflow diagrams. He spent 3 days measuring, noting, sketching, asking questions I did not always know how to answer.
On the 4th day, he sat on the stone footings and looked at the whole system with something like wonder on his face.
“This is remarkable,” he said. “Your grandfather understood thermal mass and convective airflow better than engineers I’ve met. The principle is sound. The execution is elegant.” He shook his head slowly. “Why does no one know about this except the woman who nearly froze before anyone listened?”
“Because my grandfather was poor and strange and lived in a hollow that nobody visited. Because people would rather believe someone is crazy than admit they might have been wrong.”
Professor Quarrels nodded. “I’d like to write a circular about this, a pamphlet explaining the principles, crediting your grandfather as the originator and you as the builder who proved it works.”
“Why?”
