Stone and Measure: The Bridge at Rookmere

The morning air over Rookmere folded itself into a grey shawl and clung to the cliff faces like a lantern's breath. Elias Mercer set his boots on frost-hardened turf and let the cold bite the soles for a moment; the sensation kept him honest. Below, the river cut the valley into two thumbprints of town — a cluster of low-roofed houses and the ferry, where Marta Sedge's iron bell clanged in its habitual, impatient way. A gull wheeled, its cry tasting of the harbor beyond, and the smell of smoke and baking came up from the quay: crusted pies cooling on window ledges, the town baker's ginger loaves sending a steady, domestic signal that no matter what schemes men set to, people would still need to eat.

Tom Calder was already at work, knotting the mason's line with a seriousness that bordered on sacrament. He had a habit of making solemn knots and pretending they were prayers; this morning he had laced a small ribbon into the cord, the ribbon's bright blue an affront to Elias's sober measuring tools. "You've turned my line into a lady's sash," Elias remarked without looking up, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

Tom grinned and shrugged a shoulder as if the gesture were a weapon. "It steadies your hand, master. Women like strong lines." He set a wooden peg with a practiced blow and then, inevitably, dropped his wrapped bread into the mortar bucket as if compelled by some comic gravity. He fumbled it out with a swear and a laugh, rubbing his palms and offering Elias a charred corner. "Take it. You'll like the chew; it's compact."

Elias accepted the bread with the economy of a man who measured his appetite against the day. He ran a plumbline down the gorge, the lead bob humming a low, truthful note when it found perpendicularity. He paced the bank in long, sure steps and laid out the chord with a callused hand. No surveyor's instrument could replace the feel of a line in his fingers: it taught him where the forces wanted to press, where the river would try to argue. The rope vibrated under his touch; he listened.

Across the water Marta waved a hand, and her ferryman called something that was half gossip and half weather report. The ferry's iron bell rang again, a reluctant metronome for the town's small rites. Elias shaded his eyes and watched the rope ferry bob like a leaf. Marta was a figure of pragmatic angles, her coat pinned up against the wind, a coil of rope over one shoulder. They had traded sharp words before and the kind that fit together, like draughtsmen's strokes. It was good to see a familiar shape in the day; it made the gorge feel less like an opponent and more like a neighbor.

He set the surveying staff into the earth and made his calculations aloud, not because anyone needed them but because speech steadied the brain. "Forty paces at the spring line, with room for a two-pace parapet on each side — that will pull the arch to a pleasing rise, and the curve will clear the ferry line by a foot if I live long enough to cut the keystone true."

Tom snorted, embarrassed pleasure and the want of apprenticeship mingling on his face. "You always speak of keystones like they're poems. When will you write your verse, Elias?"

Elias tapped the staff with a knuckle. "When the stone agrees."