Between the breached outer wall of the twentieth cellar and the ancient stone abutment at the base of Old Hill lay a forty-foot gap of boggy, treacherous blue marsh clay known as Low Sike.
Above the hollow stood the timber-framed municipal fish market, its heavy cedar boardwalks and gutting-stalls raised six feet off the mud on tarred oak pilings. When the founding masons had run the winter-water bypass across this dip four centuries ago, their open stone culvert had silted up and collapsed after the royal engineers bricked the hill intake shut. Simply turning the upper mill-race water loose into the twentieth cellar would never drive a pressurized head into the Furnace cooling jacket; the cold water would spill out into the boggy clay of Low Sike, wash away the fish-market pilings, and drain uselessly into the south marsh ditch.
To bridge that forty-foot gap before afternoon, Master Weaver Joran Finch and Master Mason Alden Bram had spent the morning knocking together four twelve-foot box-flumes out of two-inch seasoned pine planks, rabbeted at the seams and caulked smoking hot with melted pine pitch and tarred hemp oakum.
Now, in the raw noon drizzle under the dripping eaves of the fish market, thirty men and women stood ankle-deep in the freezing blue clay, hauling the first four-hundred-pound pine box-flume down into the trench on hemp slings.
