The final math was completed on the wooden staging board of the Four-Hundred-Foot Gallery. There, the wind had dropped to a sullen, freezing twenty knots. The morning tide turned in the estuary.
Nessa Vale sat on an upturned nail keg, her fingers wrapped around a steaming tin mug of chicory broth that Sile had brewed over the charcoal fire bowl. Across her knees lay her master math sheet—three columns of tight, neat figures written in waterproof dark oak-ink, cross-referenced against the load-bearing building tables of the Royal Naval Dockyards.
Tomas Reed stood beside her, leaning his back against the belfry pier, step by step reviewing each equation as she read them aloud.
“Dead-weight of the Great Sky-Spire above three hundred feet: twenty-four thousand tons,” Nessa read. Her voice steady and was cold and exact. “Dead-weight of the cast-bronze crown: eighty-two point four tons. Height of the crown’s balance point above the base datum: five hundred and sixty-two feet.”
She tapped her pencil against the middle column: “Total westward level bending at the summit: fourteen point two eight inches. Quirky overturning moment produced by the crown alone: eighty-two point four tons multiplied by one point one nine feet equals ninety-eight foot-tons of nonstop sideways twisting force.”
