Alden Bram climbed the exterior stone stair of the north gatehouse with the slow, heavy deliberate tread of a man who carried forty years of quarry work in his knees.
The steps, hewn from gray river limestone and mortared with river lime and crushed quartz, were damp from the evening mist. Bram kept his left hand firmly on the iron handrail, his thick fingers tracing the cold metal where the anchor bolts entered the masonry. He had set those very bolts into the wall when he was twenty-two, an apprentice working under old Master Corve. The iron had held without a grain of spalling for thirty-two winters, because he had leaded the holes himself with boiling pitch and pounded the collars flat.
In his right coat pocket, wrapped in oiled sheepskin, rested his folding boxwood two-foot rule, a piece of dry red tailor’s chalk, and a brass plumb bob with a frayed linen string.
The wind atop the ramparts blew cold off the upper bluffs, carrying the pungent smell of river mud, green willow bark, and the sharp, resinous smoke of boiling spruce pitch from the defensive kettles. Below him, the wide gray curve of the river swept past the granite piers of the bridge, foaming white where the current broke against the cutwaters.
