By eight in the evening on the twenty-second day, the turning basin had an open floor. But its main throat remained choked. The connecting water gate between the river channel and the basin—a huge six-ton leaf of seasoned greenheart oak faced with wrought-iron plates—was jammed solid inside its granite guides.
Pella knelt on the wet coping stones, holding Ada’s brass dial gauge against the upright drive spindle. The spindle was a three-inch shaft of solid glowing-bronze, threaded with heavy square-cut teeth that engaged the overhead lifting nut. Eren Tal threw his weight against the five-foot cast-iron hand-wheel. Then, the bronze shaft groaned, twisted a quarter of an inch, and locked solid with a metal screech that echoed across the water.
‘It’s bent,’ Pella said, her measuring tongs measuring the bending against a steel flat ruler. ‘One and eight-tenths inches of lateral camber, four feet from the lower thrust collar. It was probably bent five years ago. Just then, the river froze two feet thick and the ice pushed the leaf sideways against the stone doorstep.’
Ada Morland’s voice crackled through the Courtesy slate from Harrowby, brisk and decisive. ‘You can’t straighten a three-inch bronze spindle in place, Pella. If you heat it with torches in the guides, you will anneal the bronze, ruin the thread pitch, and melt the babbit bearings. You have to lift that six-ton gate fully out of the pit, pull the spindle, and take it to a heavy blacksmith’s hearth with a ten-ton screw press.’
