By eight o’clock in the evening, the rain had slackened to a thin, greasy mist. But the narrow street outside Sister Merrow’s washroom was packed solid with two hundred men and women from the lower district. They carried torches of pitch-dipped oak, shipwright’s axes, heavy iron pry-bars, and boat-hooks, their wet woolen coats steaming in the torchlight.
Word of the disaster at Miller Tom’s mill had spread through Lowbank like fire through dry shavings. On the timber mounting block outside the door sat the proof. The snapped, two-hundred-pound cast-iron gudgeon pin from the broken pit wheel, its jagged, crystal-clear fracture glistening in the rain. Beside it stood Miller Tom, his clothes stained with flour and mud. His voice shook with righteous fury as he recounted how the water had blown up from the sewer without five seconds of warning from the academy bells.
‘The High Council lied to us!’ shouted Hoke the carter, shaking a clenched fist toward the dark cliffs of the High Terrace. ‘They told us the Sluice Crown would tame the river! They told us the new machine was harmonizing the flood! And now Miller Tom’s boys are lying in splints because Sorell is choking our under-road drains to keep his own garden dry!’
