By ten o’clock in the morning, the dark sheet of standing water that had turned Fish Street into a sluggish, foul-smelling canal had fully pulled back into the granite gutters. Where four hours earlier heavy cart horses had struggled through knee-deep mud and floating barrels, the wet cobblestones now gleamed with a clean, dark sheen under the pale autumn light. The air was sharp with the earthy silt stench of exposed river gravel, mixed with the smell of wet stonework and woodsmoke from hearth fires being lit along the terraces.
Pella Rook walked slowly up the center of the street. Her boots splashed through shallow puddles that stayed in the hollows between the paving stones. She held Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs in her right hand, pausing every twenty paces to measure the water mark left against the stone foundation blocks of the houses. On the doorpost of Master Vane’s cooperage, the dark stain of the flood crest was clearly visible: fourteen inches above the flat stone slabs. Below it, the stone was drying rapidly in the river wind. That left a pale crust of river silt that flaked away under her thumb.
‘Fourteen inches at the peak,’ Pella noted, jotting the number onto her handheld slate with a blunt grease pencil. ‘The water never touched the doorstep timbers. Hal’s original curb height was off by only half an inch, even after thirty years of cart traffic settling the crown.’
