The sub-basement gallery of the Ferry Museum smelled of hardened lime, river mold. The sharp vinegar tang of damp parchment ledgers rotting inside collapsed deal boxes. Water dripped from an unmortared ceiling seam twenty paces back. It struck a broken slate floor flag with a rhythmic, clock-like regularity that measured the silence of fourteen abandoned years.
In the center of the exhibition hall, resting on an oak timber platform twenty feet long and twelve feet wide, sat the working scale model of the Lathmere river basin.
Pella Rook stopped at the edge of the cedar curb that contained the model’s gravel foundation. Her cowhide boots crunched through an inch of drifted limestone grit. Her fingers were stiff with cold, the skin around her fingernails gray from scrubbing lime paste in Sister Merrow’s kitchen before dawn. Two paces behind her, Korr Var held his dark-lantern high, tilting the brass shutter until the pale yellow beam sliced across a shroud of mildewed sailcloth that covered the entire timber platform.
“Hal Rook spent nine months in this room,” Korr said, his voice flat, carrying the thin, dry rasp of a scroll-keeper who spent his winters breathing paper dust. “The city council gave him twenty carpenters and four hundredweight of rolled copper plate. The flood commissioners signed the warrant in Year Forty-Two. Then, they promised him the model would serve as the permanent water standard for the lower wards. Master Sorell had the museum shuttered three weeks after your father drowned.”
