The final testimony of the Seven Communities was delivered not with rolls of parchment or chemical phials, but with the fragile, trembling voice of an old man whose eyes had not seen the sun in twenty winters. Jory Pell, the former bellringer of Bellwether Low Ward, stood at the bar supported by Ada Fen on his right and Cel Bren on his left. His hands, gnarled and curved like dry willow roots from half a century of pulling heavy hemp bell-ropes, rested upon the polished dark wood rail.
‘Tell the court of the morning of the Great Rise, Master Pell,’ Hester Quill asked gently.
‘I was in the tower at four bells of the morning watch,’ Jory Pell testified, his milky, unseeing eyes turned toward the vaulted ceiling. ‘The river water was already pouring through the wharf gutters. I reached for the Great Bell of Alarm—the bell that warns the Low Ward to take to the high ground. But the rope wouldn’t move. Captain Darven Holt and six armed men had entered the tower cellar with iron chains. They chained the clapper to the granite wall and padlocked the belfry doors from below. Holt shouted up the shaft that if I made a sound, he would drop me into the river. They silenced the bell, My Lords. So the rich merchants on the bluffs could load their furniture into carts before the common people knew the water was upon them.’
