The dark rock shelf at the low-water line of the Third Gate bridge pillar was only accessible for forty-five minutes on the morning ebb tide. At full flow, the brown current of the confluence swirled four feet over the stones, scouring the mortared joints with heavy river gravel and rolling cobbles. When the river pulled back, the rock emerged black and slimy with river moss. It smelled of decaying ditch-weed, dead carp, and the cold iron tang of the deep channel mud. The wind blowing down the Gray Rush was bitter. He carried the frost from the upper glaciers, freezing the river spray into rime on the timber scaffold legs. Above them, the granite piers of the Lower Bridge rose into the gray morning mist like massive stone gravestones, their cutwater blocks scarred by thirty years of spring ice jams.
Pella Rook knelt on a double pad of folded reed sacking, an iron drift pin in her gloved right hand and a three-pound hand hammer in her left. Beside her on the wet stone sat an iron crucible resting on three firebricks. Its belly glowed dull red from a bed of hardwood charcoal banked inside an iron nail keg. Her boots were sodden at the toes, the leather stiff with cold river lime that had dried into white crusts around the brass eyelets. Tucked under her left arm was Hal’s service log. It was wrapped in greased sheepskin to shield the brittle pages from the river spray. For two hours…
