"Dublin runs on soft rain, perfect pints, and Georgian houses built so the servants stayed unseen"
Kai Nakoa is twenty-four, a carpenter and surfer from Waimānalo, and he has come to Dublin in the soft rain for two weeks to learn how to restore Georgian sash windows. The place on the course was won by his Uncle Keoni, who taught him everything and has been too ill to travel since January, and the plan is that Kai will learn it all and bring it home to fix the old windows in his tūtū's cottage. He arrives carrying a nine-foot surfboard, his grandfather's chisels, and a hoodie pocket full of wedges he whittles on planes, because every problem in the world is a wedge problem.
The Servants' Stair is a 1791 townhouse on Mountjoy Square, run by Franny, a former Aer Lingus hostess who calls the Partner Hub Himself, after the man of the house whose moods everyone tiptoes round. Twelve brass servants' bells still hang in the basement kitchen, now rung by the app. Aoife, on the front desk, gives the house's history with a list of its sins. Digo, the Brazilian night porter, makes the best toastie in Dublin and has recently lost the pom-pom from his mother's knitted beanie. In Kai's dorm, the Stoker, are Léa, a French photographer who crosses to the far kerb to avoid walking under windows; Nadia, who builds escape rooms in Melbourne; Konni, a Leipzig tax adviser scoring every pint of Guinness in the city; and Piers Holloway, who has 640,000 followers for hiding inside suits of armour and priest holes, and who jumps out of the wardrobe at Kai before they have even met. The Wi-Fi password is GrandSoftDay.
Kai takes one look at the dumbwaiter and knows, the way you know a wave is going to close out: somebody has married two different ropes. Every sash window in the house has a motor bolted straight through its old timber, and the Hub opens them at three in the morning. Piers's selfie stick is sheared in half when the hatch drops like a guillotine. When Piers's content intern rides the car up the shaft to film a POV-you're-the-toastie clip, it starts to slip with her inside it. Kai and his teacher Bernie carve the ratchet an oak pawl that will simply refuse to let it fall. And FreeToWander sponsors the event Piers has been dreaming of: sardines, the whole house, forty players, the lights down, on Saturday night.
Age: 24
Type: Native Hawaiian carpenter and surfer
Fatal Flaw: Believes every problem in the world is a wedge problem
Role: Protagonist
Age: 29
Type: Professional hider in historic buildings, @PiersHides
Fatal Flaw: Has never met a small dark space he wouldn't climb into
Role: Victim
Age: 26
Type: French photographer, fresh from Budapest
Fatal Flaw: Waits on the far kerb for a gap in the windows
Role: Ally
Age: 27
Type: Escape-room designer from Melbourne
Fatal Flaw: Notices where everyone looks first, including the exits
Role: Ally
Age: 67
Type: Owner and former Aer Lingus hostess
Fatal Flaw: Signed up for the free heritage retrofit
Role: Keeper of the house
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Last Orders"
At 1:57 on Monday morning, Rodrigo Almeida was making the best toastie in Dublin for someone who did not exist.
He didn't know that yet. At 1:57 he only knew the order had come in on the Room Service printer. The printer was a small grey box on the end of the bar that chattered like a nervous tooth whenever somebody upstairs tapped a button in the app. The docket curled out onto the flagstones:
THE SERVANTS' STAIR · ROOM SERVICE 🛎️
Order #1183 · 01:56
1x Ham & Cheese Toastie (the Digo)
1x Pot of Tea (Barry's, strong)
Deliver to: FLOOR 3
Note: no rush. take your time.
"No rush," Digo told the basement. "Okay. Very polite. Very Irish. I like you already, Floor Three."
The basement of No. 39 Mountjoy Square had been a kitchen for two hundred and thirty-odd years, and it still acted like one. The ceiling was low and vaulted and whitewashed, and it sweated in wet weather, and it was always wet weather. The floor was big uneven flagstones worn into shallow bowls by two centuries of feet carrying coal and soup and chamber pots. Against the back wall stood a black iron range the size of a small car. Nobody had lit it since 1962, and Franny kept it polished with black lead like a coffin at a wake. In front of it, looking embarrassed about the company, sat the things that did the actual work now: two stainless-steel toastie presses, a chip fryer, a kettle as big as a fire extinguisher and a fridge full of cheddar.
The guests called it the Scullery. Franny had painted the name in gold on a board over the door, and under it, smaller: BAR · KITCHEN · CRAIC (NO GUARANTEE).
Above the door hung the bells.
There were twelve of them, brass, on curled steel springs, in a row on a mahogany board. Under each one a painted label had faded to the colour of weak tea: FRONT DOOR. HALL. LIBRARY. DINING ROOM. DRAWING ROOM. MASTER. MISTRESS. BLUE ROOM. GREEN ROOM. NURSERY. GOVERNESS. ROOF. In 1791 a man upstairs could pull a velvet rope in the drawing room, and down here, forty feet away through the walls, a bell would jangle on its spring, and a girl of fourteen would put down whatever she was scrubbing and run.
Digo had been told all this on his first night by Aoife, the day receptionist. She did the ghost tour on Thursdays and could not turn it off.
"Imagine," she'd said, "being summoned by a bell. Your whole life. Someone rings, and you run."
"I work in Dublin hospitality," Digo had said. "Aoife, I don't have to imagine."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Servants' Stair, quoted from the book.
☠ "the staff are wonderful. the lift is historic. everyone is served eventually. thank you for wandering. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "hiding is a lovely hobby. exposure: high. ☠" — @HostelReaper