DOMUS BURROWFOOT
Private Residence · Upper Collis, Western Slope · Brin-Sula
“I have visited Merry's house twice. Both times she offered me tea and made it clear, through a quality of hospitality that is entirely welcoming and entirely definite about its own terms, that I was welcome as long as she wished me to be welcome and that she would let me know when that had changed. Both visits lasted approximately three hours. I consider this the correct duration for a visit to Merry Burrowfoot's house, and I consider having understood it correctly one of the small professional achievements of my career.”
The Domus Burrowfoot is a small house on the upper western slope of the Collis, acquired by Merry Burrowfoot in 1189 A.P. when she retired from active captaincy and requiring somewhere to live that was on the Collis and close to the ridge woodland. It is two storeys, the ground floor given over to the common room and the kitchen and the navigational chart storage that has expanded to occupy most of the available wall surface on the ground floor and a significant portion of the first floor, and the upper floor to Merry's sleeping quarters and a small room whose function she describes as thinking and that contains a desk, a chair, a window facing the ocean approach, and a locked chest.
The house is notable primarily because of who lives in it. Merry Burrowfoot, eighty-one years old in 1200 A.P., is the most experienced southern crossing navigator alive, the Pilot's Guild's senior emeritus advisor, the person who named Hearthsrest, and Plinius's oldest friend. She is not easily approached by strangers. She has a quality of assessing visitors in the first thirty seconds of a conversation that several people have described as unsettling and that she describes as efficient. She has been making this assessment for eighty-one years and has not yet found cause to change the methodology.
Purpose / Function
A private residence in the fullest sense: not open to visitors without invitation, not a place of business, not accessible except through Merry's own decision to admit someone. It functions, additionally, as the informal archive for Merry's navigational records: sixty-nine years of crossing logs, weather observations, current notes, and the private journal she has kept since the age of twelve, which she has described to Plinius as the only record of the southern ocean's behaviour across the full span of its commercial history. The Pilot's Guild has requested access to this journal on three occasions. She has declined on all three. Her position is that it is a personal record, that its methodology is informal, and that she has already provided the Guild with the formal data they need. She has not mentioned the locked chest.
Design
A private residence in the fullest sense: not open to visitors without invitation, not a place of business, not accessible except through Merry's own decision to admit someone. It functions, additionally, as the informal archive for Merry's navigational records: sixty-nine years of crossing logs, weather observations, current notes, and the private journal she has kept since the age of twelve, which she has described to Plinius as the only record of the southern ocean's behaviour across the full span of its commercial history. The Pilot's Guild has requested access to this journal on three occasions. She has declined on all three. Her position is that it is a personal record, that its methodology is informal, and that she has already provided the Guild with the formal data they need. She has not mentioned the locked chest.
Entries
Invitation only. Merry opens the door herself. She does not keep staff. She does not receive visitors unannounced, on the grounds that unannounced visitors have decided on her behalf that their timing is convenient and she prefers to make that determination herself. The two exceptions to this rule, both documented by Plinius, are: Pip Farrow, the harbour customs inspector, who has been permitted to arrive unannounced since an occasion in 1193 A.P. that neither of them has explained; and Sedge Willet, Fern's second cousin, who has had standing unannounced access for six weeks, since the morning he knocked on her door before first light with his depth sounding notebook. She invited him in for tea. She asked him to keep taking readings. She has been receiving his weekly notebooks since.
Sensory & Appearance
The house from the outside: small, tidy, the garden immaculate in the halfling domestic tradition, the western-facing windows catching the afternoon light. At the door: the smell of the chart paper and the oil used to preserve it, overlaid by whatever Merry is cooking, which is always something specific and always good. Inside: the charts on every surface, the quality of concentrated organisation, the specific warmth of a house that is occupied by someone who knows exactly how they want to live and has arranged their environment accordingly. The locked chest in the thinking room is visible from the doorway if the door is open. Plinius has seen it twice. He has not asked about it.
Denizens
Merry Burrowfoot , eighty-one, retired captain, Pilot's Guild senior emeritus advisor, Plinius's oldest friend. Four foot two, brown and weathered like driftwood, white hair salt-bleached for sixty years. She moves on land with the slight discomfort of someone who considers it a regrettable transitional medium. She is direct, practical, funny when she chooses to be, and possessed of an intelligence she has spent eighty years disguising as simple common sense. Her agenda, as of 1200 A.P., is to establish the halfling fleet's position as the indispensable maritime link in any Rift XIII response, and to assemble, before she decides what to do with it, the full picture of the ocean anomaly data that she has been collecting from three separate observers who do not know about each other.
Valuables
The navigational chart collection represents the most comprehensive cartographic record of the southern crossing in private hands. The journal represents the crossing's observational history across the full span of its commercial operation. Both are irreplaceable. The locked chest's contents are not known to anyone who has been asked about it. Merry has never mentioned the chest. Plinius has noticed it twice and has, with the disciplined restraint of a scholar who understands that some information becomes available when the person holding it decides to share it, not asked.
History
Merry Burrowfoot was born in 1119 A.P. in Brinhaven. She began sailing at twelve, completed her first full southern crossing at twenty as part of the crew that established the commercial route in 1031 A.P. -- the same crossing on which she named Hearthsrest -- and has been making the crossing in some capacity since. She held active captaincy for fifty-eight years before retiring in 1189 A.P. The house on the Collis was purchased in that year. She has maintained the crossing schedule of two to three per year since, as senior emeritus advisor to the Pilot's Guild and on the grounds that she has never agreed with retirement as it applies to herself. She has saved Plinius's life twice. She considers this unremarkable. See Annales Mundi and Dramatis Personae for further detail.
Comments