The weight on Noll’s shoulders did not relent. It grew colder, settling into his limestone frame with the damp, suffocating malice of soaked hill turf and pulverized river slate.
Above his head, the green oak tie-beam groaned under four tons of collapsed gable. Every fiber of the timber shrieked against the rough granite shelf of his neck and raised forearms. In the stone floor, his knees had gouged two white trenches into the mortar. Through his sensory tether to the cistern below, he could feel the deep bedrock of the hill shuddering with every pulse of the Crown artillery batteries on the high north ridge.
“Turn the bar!” Tessa shouted from the doorway, her forearms corded with strain, her face smeared with pale mortar dust. “Hesta, heave! Put your back into the iron!”
Beside her, Hesta Quill threw her full weight against the heavy ash lever of the timber screw-jack. The woman’s boots slid through broken plaster, but she caught herself on the door frame, gritting her teeth. The greased iron thread of the jack shrieked. A quarter-turn. Another quarter-turn. The massive timber shoe at the head of the upright post rose a fraction of an inch, biting into the fractured lintel above them.
