The blue dashboard light of Ada Morland’s battered Ford Transit van clicked off. She turned the starting key in the gravel yard behind St. Jude’s Lane. Rain tapped against the curved windshield, steady and gray. It ran in dirty rivulets through the soot left by the morning coal lorries. It was twelve-ten. She had fifty minutes before she had to be across town to bleed the radiators at the parish hall, and twenty-four of those minutes were already spoken for.
On the passenger seat, sitting on top of a greasy stack of delivery invoices and an old copy of the Harrowby Gazette, rested her check tote.
Ada unzipped the canvas bag and checked each item against the yellow lined pad clipped to the steering wheel. An eighteen-inch forged steel pipe wrench. A set of brass feeler gauges in an oiled leather sleeve. A four-inch brass drift. A coil of waxed hemp twine. A heavy brass dial pressure gauge with a quarter-inch narrowed iron male thread. And, tucked into the side pocket, a blue spray can of heavy-duty piercing solvent with a plastic red straw taped to its flank.
“Don’t try the spray, Auntie,” Ben said from the driver’s side window. The seventeen-year-old was leaning under a dripping waxed jacket, his hands stuffed deep into his donkey jacket pockets, his breath pluming in the damp October chill. “You know what happened to the torch battery on Wednesday. The chemical paste turned into chalk before you even got your arm through.”
“The torch was an electric cell,” Ada said, lifting the spray can. She weighed it in her palm. The liquid sloshed inside the thin tinplate shell with a crisp, hollow metal rattle. “This isn’t electricity. It’s just light stone spirits and a bit of propane propellant under pressure. If those old water gate bolts across the water are as rusted as Pella says, we’ll spend half my lunch hour hammering on a cold chisel unless we can soak the threads.”
“Propane is volatile,” Ben pointed out. He tapped the side of the van door with a blunt pencil. “That girl’s arch strips anything with high vapor pressure. That’s what the notes said. If the molecule wants to leap into gas at room heat, the bridge unhooks it.”
“We’ll find out in thirty seconds,” Ada said.
She picked up the tote, climbed out of the cab into the puddles. Then she pulled the van’s sliding side door open. In the back of the Transit, cleared of scrap copper pipe and empty flux tubs, the brass courtesy arch stood wedged between two wooden toolboxes. It was bolted to a heavy piece of marine plywood to keep it from tipping on the ribbed metal floor.
The faint oval in the center was already shimmering. It glowed with that strange, pale amber hue that looked like sunlight shining through a pint of flat cider.
Ada set the canvas bag on the floorboards, knelt on an old rubber kneeling mat. Then she took the blue spray can in her left hand. Her fingers were stiff from forty years of turning cold iron unions, the knuckle of her middle finger swollen from an old slip against a cast-iron boiler casing.
“Watch the seam,” she instructed Ben, who climbed into the van’s side opening, keeping his boots clear of the wooden mounting board.
Ada brought the spray can toward the arch.
The plastic nozzle crossed the outer edge of the brass ring. Then, there was no explosion, no flash of fire, and no heroic crackle of lightning. What occurred was far more mundane, and far more irritating.
A soft, prolonged hiss escaped from the top of the can. The curled crimp where the domed steel top joined the tube-shaped body didn’t tear. Instead, the tiny seal around the valve simply went slack. The internal pressure vanished in a cold puff of odorless white vapor that smelled briefly of damp cellar air and lamp-wax. The tin sides of the can dimpled inward with a dull clonk, as if someone had stepped on an empty bean tin in the gutter.
Ada pulled her hand back. The plastic red straw was brittle and cracked. When she shook the can, there was no slosh. The solvent inside had separated into a grayish, inert wax that sat dead in the bottom of the tin.
“Told you,” Ben said, his pencil scratching the watching across his pad. “Propellant gone. Liquid carrier collapsed into lamp-wax animal fat.”
“Fifty pence worth of piercing oil ruined in three seconds,” Ada muttered. She set the useless tin on the floorboards. “That stuff could loosen a shipyard rope winch.”
“It loosens things here,” Ben said, examining the gray waxy residue through the hole where the plastic nozzle had popped off. “Over there, it doesn’t have the chemical tension to hold its vapor. The bridge doesn’t permit complex volatile chains. It treats them like bad air and bleeds them out.”
“Then we test the clockwork backup,” Ada said. She reached into her lower drawer. Then she pulled out a small, heavy flask of cold-hammered copper with a boxwood stopper wrapped in oiled sheepskin. “Neatsfoot oil. Rendered down by the tanners from cow hooves and filtered three times through calico.”
She held the copper flask up to the light. She uncorked it, dipped the tip of her brass drift into the golden liquid. Then she touched it to a cold lead washer sitting on the vice anvil. The drop spread in a smooth, clinging circle, thick, sticky and heavy.
“Bring it to the ring,” Ben said, watching with his pencil ready.
Ada brought the copper flask to the arch. The shimmer parted around it without a sound. The oil remained golden, clear, and perfectly fluid, its water’s skin holding true against the copper neck.
“Natural animal fats hold,” Ben recorded. “No high-pressure propellant. Passive liquid holding power survives. What about the digital measuring tongs?”
He picked up a blue plastic case from the cab seat. He opened it to reveal a stainless steel digital measuring tongs with an LCD readout powered by a tiny silver-oxide button cell. He clicked it on. The numbers read zero point zero inches in crisp black segments.
Ben held the jaw of the measuring tongs near the threshold. Soon as the electronic display entered the fringe of the amber light. Then, the LCD segments blurred into gray smudge. Two seconds later, the battery voltage dropped to total zero. The screen died into an inert gray rectangle of cold glass.
“No batteries,” Ada said, nodding with grim satisfaction. “Just like the torch. If it has a chemical cell inside that relies on a factory electrolyte, it turns into dead paste. Give me the brass dividers and the steel rule.”
From her drawer she took a heavy pair of eight-inch forged steel spring dividers and an English steel rule marked in sixteenths of an inch. She wiped the protective grease from the steel with a scrap of dry calico rag, checked that the thumb-wheel adjusted smoothly, and laid them in the top pocket of her canvas bag.
“Right,” she said, hooking the spring scale to the bag’s webbed handles. “Let’s see what the total comes to.”
Ben lifted the spring scale. The brass pointer slid down the notched face: five point four pounds.
“You’ve got one point six pounds to spare,” Ben said. “You could carry another wrench.”
“I don’t need another wrench,” Ada answered, adjusting her knitted wool watch cap. “One eighteen-inch stillson will turn anything in a cellar if you know how to set the jaw. If an eighteen-inch won’t turn it, you don’t need a bigger wrench. You need heat, time, and someone who understands why the threads are binding. Check the clock.”
“Twelve-fourteen,” Ben said. “One minute until your declared break.”
Ada took her padded steel thermos of lentil soup from the cab, slipped it into her deep donkey jacket pocket. Then she set both feet firmly on the rubber kneeling mat.
“Keep the van locked while I’m through,” she said. “If Sal Bell rings about the church boiler, tell her I’ve isolated the main and I’ll be back on site before the parish clerk finishes his sandwich.”
“I’ll tell her,” Ben said. “Thirty seconds on the red tab, Auntie. Don’t be polite.”
“Plumbers aren’t polite when pipes are leaking, Ben,” Ada replied. “They just turn the valve.”
The brass arch gave its sharp, clear noon chime. Ada picked up her five-point-four-two-pound tote, took a long, steady breath of the damp October rain. Then she stepped through the oval into Lowbank.