Master Mason Alden Bram knelt on a folded burlap sack in the wet gravel of the twentieth cellar’s threshold, his horn-rimmed spectacles perched near the tip of his nose and his seventy-year-old knees Popping once as he settled his weight beside the fourth pine box-flume.
Every builder in the valley knew that water was the only magistrate that could never be bribed. You could cheat an incompetent bailiff on the thickness of a rubble wall with a coat of whitewash, and you could fool a town alderman on the seasoning of a roof-rafter if you painted it with tar, but you could never lie to river water about a gradient. Give a forty-foot timber flume half an inch of reverse tilt across boggy clay, and the stream would back up into old Thom’s cellar and rot the floorboards before Sunday.
Bram laid his three-foot leaded oak spirit-level squarely along the planed top rail of the fourth pine trough where it joined the ancient dressed-stone abutment of Old Hill.
In the center of the oak bar, beneath a curved brass guard, a small glass phial filled with clear grain spirits held a single golden air-bubble. Right now, the bubble kissed the north hair-line by the thickness of a barleycorn.
