From Dima Fen’s tailor loft, Pella walked south along the gravel towpath to the excavated bowl of the old Ferry Turning Basin. There, the smell of wet river silt, freshly sawed elm timber, and hot animal fat axle-grease hung heavy in the raw autumn wind. Upstream beyond the limestone bluffs, the clouds over the High Tor peaks had darkened to the bruised purple of an approaching mountain rainstorm. The river level against the lower wharf wooden support posts had risen four inches since midnight.
Yet down inside the wide stone basin that had lain choked with reeds and garbage for fourteen winters, there was no sign of panic or pause. Thirty-eight-year-old Hesta, the tough proprietor of the Southern Bridge commercial laundries, stood on the timber staging above the newly cleared marsh-overflow water gate wearing a heavy oilskin apron over her wool skirts and directing four burly draymen with a three-foot iron valve-key.
Fifty yards to the east, Foreman Eren Tal sat astride a temporary oak frame stand beside the neighborhood Triage Board, routing incoming cellar complaints and timber requests through the elected Lowbank Flood Committee while two apprentice carpenters greased the bronze screw-spindles of Gate One.
“Give that left spindle another half-pint of boiled sheep fat and black-lead before you run the nut down, lads!” Hesta called out in a voice trained to carry over twelve roaring copper laundry boilers. “When the grey water comes through this throat tomorrow, nobody is going to have time to fetch an oil-can!”
