The smell of dried comfrey, elder-bark, and fresh cedar shavings drifted across the gravel terrace above the river.
Fen dipped a clean linen strip into a basin of boiled well-water, wrung it out with red, chapped hands, and laid it neatly on the drying rack beside the clinic window. His fingers were stiff from three hours of sewing suture cloth, but they were steady. He had spent thirty years setting broken legs in ditch hospitals and washing gangrene out of miners’ wounds; he knew how to hold a needle without shaking, even when the wind coming down the gorge brought the bitter, metallic tang of unseasoned pine smoke from the charcoal burners.
Across the threshold, Soldier Joss was standing on a pair of sturdy spruce sawhorses, holding an eight-inch iron mounting bracket against the heavy oak lintel.
“Two inches higher on the left, Joss,” Fen called out, stepping onto the porch with a handful of wrought-iron lag bolts. “The grain runs crosswise in that corner. If you drive the lag into the sapwood, the frost will heave the timber before the first snow.”
“Aye, Master Fen,” Joss answered, shifting his weight on the plank. The former artillery driver was wearing a clean canvas smock over his wool trousers, his camp bread knife riding in a leather sheath tucked into his apron bib. He tapped the iron bracket with the wooden handle of his adze, aligning the screw holes with two chalk marks Tessa Dene had scribed that morning. “The lintel…
