Truss

The sounds that rattled against those walls: an old man reading aloud by a tallow candle, a mother reciting a list of chores for her son, a group of children singing a taunt, a dog loudly gnawing its leg as it lies before a crackling fire. Did they leave a residue, accreting like cobwebs to an opaque tapestry, two hundred years of voices woven to an auditory black? And what hands could tease them apart, great unraveler, knots of chatter loosed into chant?