By three o’clock in the afternoon, the Eleanor Gorge had become a tiered arena of cold, clockwork fury.
Three of the massive sixty-foot heart-oak rakers were now standing in position against the downstream face of Pier Six, their feet anchored into the bolted sole-piece, their heads wedged against the granite cut stone of the lower arcade. But an unbraced timber shore was an unstable, living thing. Under crushing shock-loads, sixty feet of unsupported oak baulk would buckle laterally in the middle. It snapped like a dry twig under forty tons of thrust unless tied into a massive stone truss.
Tomas Reed stood upon a suspended timber staging platform thirty feet above the riverbed, balanced between the second and third raking shores.
The staging was built of two-inch spruce planks lashed across the timbers with hemp cordage, swaying sickeningly in the fifty-mile-an-hour wind that screamed through the arches. Cold rain had begun to fall, mixing with the nonstop curtains of spray from Tier Three, turning the wood slick as greased glass. His calfskin wrist brace was soaked through. But the tight leather binding kept his scarred left tendon rigid as he swung a heavy four-foot shell-auger into position against the oak baulk.
