The winding stone stairs of the North Gate bell tower were cold as a tomb, the limestone steps worn hollow by two hundred years of watchmen’s boots. Tomas Reed climbed slowly. That kept his good right hand on the iron guide-rope. Meanwhile, his left forearm rested motionless within its supportive sling. The cold river gale whipped through the narrow arrow-slits, carrying the scent of salt spray and morning mist from the waking harbor.
In the drafty timber belfry eighty feet above the cobblestones, current Bell Keeper Dalen Ross stood beside the massive bronze rim of the Great North Bell. Dalen was fifty, his hair white at the temples, his hands wrapped in greasy sheepskin mittens. On the timber bench behind him lay the cut rope that Holt’s saboteur had pulled three hours before.
Tomas stepped onto the oak platform. Then he held out the wax-sealed metal tube of Deposit Seven Hundred and Twelve. Then, Dalen backed away. It shook his head vehemently.
“Take that paper away from here, porter!” Dalen cried, his voice shrill with anxiety. “I know what that’s! That’s old Jory Pell’s settling from the flood morning! The judges are already whispering that the bell-ringers aided the saboteurs! If you file that record in this belfry, the High Guild will say we were accomplices to the treason! They will strip our pensions and hang our bells!”
“Look at the document, Dalen,” Tomas said. He stepped forward until the metal tube was inches from the bell keeper’s chest. “Jory Pell was your predecessor. When the water rose thirty-nine years ago, Captain Holt didn’t merely order the bells rung late. He came up these very stairs, locked Jory and his three apprentices into the belfry from the outside. Then he carried away the belfry keys in his pocket so no one could ring the low-ward warning. Jory hammered on the iron door with a cobble-stone until his fingers were broken, trying to reach the clapper.”
Tomas broke the red wax seal. He unfolded the crisp thick parchment transcription notarized by Hester Quill. “This paper doesn’t accuse the bell-ringers of treason. It proves that the common watch and the bell keepers were victims of Darven Holt’s conspiracy. It clears thirty-nine years of shame from this tower.”
Dalen adjusted his glasses, his eyes scanning the sharp, legal sentences written in dark oak-ink. His trembling fingers traced Jory Pell’s signed name at the bottom. The shaky, jagged cross of an old man whose hands had been ruined by stone and iron.
“Old Jory... He tried to ring?” Dalen whispered.
“He tried until the water filled the archway below,” Tomas replied. “Take the record, Dalen. Hang it on the timber frame beside the bell-rope. Whenever a new apprentice climbs these stairs, let him read that the bell didn’t fail the people. A corrupt commander failed the bell.”
Dalen Ross didn’t right away reach for his tack-hammer. His eyes, red-rimmed from forty years of watching river fogs through the belfry angled slats, moved from the jagged cross at the foot of Jory Pell’s thick parchment transcription to the heavy iron-studded oak door at the head of the spiral stairs. He walked slowly across the timber platform. He pulled off one greasy sheepskin mitten. Then he ran his bare fingertips over three deep, splintered gouges scarred into the lower oak stile just above the iron box-lock. Marks that had been painted over with thick gray lead-primer so many times that the young watchmen thought they were old timber knots.
“When I came into this tower as a second-class ringer in Year Twelve,” Dalen said, his voice dropping to a low, unsteady rasp in the whistling harbor draft, “the guild provost told us those dents in the bottom plank were made by drunken draymen trying to break into the powder-locker during the bread riots. And look here, under the iron staple.”
Tomas stepped beside the bell keeper. He held his bullseye lantern low with his right hand. Meanwhile, his left forearm rested inside its black wool sling against his ribs. Wedged deep into the wood slot-joint between the oak doorframe and the limestone door post, half-buried under forty years of dried lime-wash and pigeon dust, sat the broken, rusted stub of an iron bell-tuning wedge. The exact tool a master ringer carried on his belt to thin wedge the oak yoke-bearings in wet weather.
“Jory Pell didn’t just hammer on the planks with a cobblestone, Dalen,” Tomas said quietly, tracing the rusted iron stub in the wood slot without prying it loose. “He tried to spring the bolt-tongue from the inside with his tuning wedge until the hardened steel snapped off in the stone. Then, when he heard the water roaring over the lower weir and knew no one was coming up the stairs to unlock the door, he climbed down the emergency ladder into the Lantern intake room below the gatehouse and put Deposit Seven Hundred and Twelve into the bronze ring before the surge took the lower arch.”
From the bottom of the bronze metal tube in his satchel, Tomas drew a second, smaller item wrapped in oiled bladder-skin and laid it on the timber bench beside the cut saboteur’s rope. A battered brass striking-watch whose crystal face had stopped forever at eleven minutes past four, with its silver winding-stem bent flat by a heavy boot-heel.
“Aven Lark found this wedged inside the outer casing of Jory’s canister,” Tomas continued. He unfolded the notarized property schedule with his right hand. “When Captain Holt locked the belfry door from the outside at four o’clock, Jory Pell threw his pocket-watch through the upper louver-slit onto the low roof wall walk and shouted to the gate sentries to mark the hour before Holt’s men kicked the watch into the gutter. One of the common sentries picked it up out of the mud and slipped it into Jory’s deposit canister at the intake booth so the exact minute of the lock-in would stand in the metal.”
Dalen Ross picked up the stopped brass pocket-watch with both hands, his gray head bowing as he read the engraved stone carving inside the tarnished back cover: J. Pell, Chief Ringer, Bellwether Watch—True Time & Clear Sound.
“Thirty-nine winters,” Dalen whispered, his thumb trembling against the bent winding-stem. “Every year on the anniversary of the breach, when the guild aldermen marched across High Bridge in their mourning ribbons, they deducted four silver pennies from every bell-ringer’s winter pay as an Endless Negligence Fine for failing to sound the low-ward chime in Year One. My own boy refused to take the apprentice rope last spring because the schoolboys in the High Ward called us the Sleepers of the North Tower.”
“The Endless Negligence Fine was struck from the town treasury rolls by Master Clerk Berran three hours ago,” Tomas said firmly. He opened his master ledger on the oak bench beside the Great North Bell and holding the page flat against the harbor wind with his lead weight. “And Advocate Quill has attached thirty-nine years of unlawfully deducted pay pennies—with lawful interest—against Darven Holt’s forfeited High Bluff estate. Your son can climb these stairs with his head up, Dalen. The city owes this tower thirty-nine years of back-pay.”
Dalen laid Jory Pell’s stopped pocket-watch carefully into the carved wooden recess above the belfry log-desk, right where the morning sun coming over the eastern estuary would strike the brass face at dawn. Above them, Jory’s sheepskin muffler-hood still bound the four-ton clapper tongue silent until the low-tide extraction was complete. But the air in the high timber room no longer smelled of disgrace.
Dalen took the document, his eyes wet with tears. He walked to the central timber pillar, took an iron tack from his pocket. Then he drove the thick parchment firmly into the seasoned oak heartwood with his hammer. Then, he turned to Tomas. He dipped his reed pen into his inkpot and signed the seven hundred and twelfth receipt in Tomas’s open ledger.