Once the lead stub beneath the second basin had been hammered flat and clamped between two iron plates bolted into the flat stone slabs, Pella Rook unlocked her father’s cedar plan-chest. Then she carried the bottom portfolio out to the main bread table. Sister Merrow had finished the morning bake. The back kitchen was warm and dry, smelling of toasted sourdough crust, beeswax, and fresh boiled tea.
Eren Tal wiped the lead filings from his knuckles with a linseed rag and helped Pella weight the four corners of a six-foot linen blueprint using iron scale weights and a tin box of grease pencils. The linen was yellowed with age and smelled faintly of river silt stench from the flood of fourteen years ago, its margins annotated in Hal Rook’s square, upright draftsman’s hand in faded brown dark oak-ink.
‘Here is the Sluice Crown as it was built two hundred years ago,’ Pella said, tracing the broad stone weir that spanned the limestone gorge above the city. ‘Three mountain rivers hit the gorge within four hundred yards of each other: the High Tor from the north snowfields, the Gray Rush from the western shale valleys, and the Silt Reach from the eastern peat bogs.’
