On the twenty-third afternoon of the restoration, Len Vey sat on a low, three-legged carpenter’s bench in the sunny courtyard behind the central tram kitchen.
The air was mild, tasting of thawing soil and sweet pine shavings. But Len kept his wool courier coat buttoned to the neck. His left arm remained resting securely within its ash-wood splints and black wool sling, bound tight against his ribs. But Carrying Balance held his torso perfectly upright without muscular strain. In his sound right hand, he held an old, horn-handled leather-working gouge. A carbon-steel blade that had belonged to his father, sharpened on a river siltstone until the curved cutting edge could shave the fuzz from a dry willow twig.
Resting across his knees was a clean, two-foot plank of seasoned white pine, six inches wide and two inches thick, cut from a timber baulk by the railway carpenters that morning.
With slow, rhythmic, unrushed pressure, Len drove the curved steel gouge into the pale, fragrant wood. Each stroke produced a clean, curling ribbon of yellow pine shaving that peeled away with a soft, stringy whisper, revealing the crisp, dark shadow of a deeply cut cleanly letter.
He had been working for three hours, carving the lines of a stone carving he had carried in his memory for seven years:
