The Lock-Keeper's Physic

• Chapter 1 The Keeper of the Lock
• Chapter 2 The First Cough
• Chapter 3 The Rising of the Silt
• Chapter 4 The Mortar and the Pestle
• Chapter 5 A Bitter Draught
• Chapter 6 The Bargeman’s Fever
• Chapter 7 Alchemy of the Hedgerow
• Chapter 8 The Slow Flow of the River Lea
• Chapter 9 Secrets of the Sluice Gate
• Chapter 10 The Apothecary’s Disdain
• Chapter 11 Black Water, Bright Blooms
• Chapter 12 The Swelling Tide of Ills
• Chapter 13 The False Recovery
• Chapter 14 Whispers on the Towpath
• Chapter 15 A Harvest of Willow Bark
• Chapter 16 The Toll-House Ledger
• Chapter 17 The Poisoned Wellspring
• Chapter 18 Night-Soil and Copperas
• Chapter 19 The Dying of the Draft Horses
• Chapter 20 An Unknowing Hand
• Chapter 21 The Ghost of the Canal
• Chapter 22 The Tonic of Last Resort
• Chapter 23 Heavy Metals and Holy Water
• Chapter 24 The Lock-Keeper’s Delusion
• Chapter 25 The Great Stagnation
• Chapter 26 The Quiet Silt of the Graves

The timber of the lower gate was five-inch oak, grayed by twenty winters of frost and slicked to the height of a man’s chest by the greasy scum of the river. When the river rose in November, the oak swelled until the joints bit together so tight that not a trickle of water could force its way between them; when the dry droughts of August shrank the grain, the gate wept thin, steady jets into the chamber below, whispering like a dozen leaking spigots.

Thomas Reed knew every check, split, and iron bolt in those gates. He knew them by the sound they made when the great balance beams were pushed home, and he knew them by the particular shudder that ran up through his leather-soled boots when the river came resting its full weight against the timber.

It was six o'clock of an October morning in the year of our Lord 1624. The sun had not yet cleared the high mist that hung over the marshes of the Lea, but the sky above the eastern willow-slips had turned the color of peeled ash. Thomas stood on the upper catwalk, a heavy wooden beetle resting against his thigh, waiting for the first lighter of the day to round the bend from Old Ford.

Below him, the water in the lock-pit was black as pitch and still as a graveyard well. A skim of yellow leaves from the river-side poplars drifted on the surface, caught in the stagnant corner behind the upper paddle-gate. Thomas leaned over the rail, spat cleanly into the froth, and watched his spittle float away without dissolving. The water was thick this season—thick and cold, with a heavy, sweetish stench to it that smelled less of fresh river-silt and more of the sluggish ditch-water that sat behind the malt-houses three miles up stream.

"Heigh-ho, lock-man!"

The voice came through the fog before the boat did—a broad, wet rasp made rough by thirty years of London draft and bad beer. A moment later, the blunt nose of a fifty-ton grain lighter broke through the white wall of river-mist. Her towing line dripped thick, black drops into the water, stretched bar-tight back to the muddy towpath where a solitary draft horse labored with his head pinned low to the gravel.

Thomas set his beetle down against the iron windlass and wiped his palms on his hempen apron. "You’re early on the tide, Master Barnaby," he called down as the boat glided into the narrow stone throat of the lock.

complete silence took the channel as the horse stopped, its sides heaving in great, steaming spasms. The boatman, a thick-set man named Barnaby Clout with eyebrows like furze-bushes and a coat patched with oilcloth, threw his hemp turn around the mooring timber with the easy flick of a man who had done it ten thousand times.

"Tide waits for no man's porridge, Thomas," Clout grunted, leaning his full weight against his steering sweep to keep the stem from knocking the stone cheek of the lock. "And the millers at Ratcliff are screaming for this barley as if it were pure gold dust. Up-country's dry as a bone. Every weir from Hertford down is choked with weed and mud, and the river runs like cold lard."

"It runs slow enough," Thomas agreed. He stepped to the upper beam, planted his heels against the stone foot-rests, and threw his body weight backward against the timber arm.

The oak beam groaned—a deep, wooden protest that vibrated through the small of his back—and the upper paddle lifted three inches out of its groove. Water shot through the aperture below with a muffled, thunderous roar, boiling up from the depths of the pit in a churn of gray foam. The lighter gave a sudden, greasy lurch as the rising volume caught her bilge, then began her slow, majestic ascension between the dripping ashlar walls.

Thomas worked the paddle-rack with steady, unhurried iron-work. He was fifty-two years of age, though the river air and hard pine-wood smoke had tanned his hide to the color and toughness of a saddle-flaps. His arms were long and knotty, his eyes gray as a winter sky, and his breath smelled faintly of the dried mint he chewed to keep the dampness from settling in his throat.

While the lock filled, Barnaby Clout reached into the well of his cabin and pulled out a small earthen pipkin. He held it up toward Thomas, his face screwed up in a scowl that brought his nose down almost to his upper lip.

"You've a drop of that willow-water left in the house, Lock-man? My knees are full of gravel this morning, and the boy here has been coughing his lungs into his cap since we passed Stortford."

Thomas looked down into the boat. In the fore-peak, hunched over a sack of damp oats, sat a lad of fifteen or sixteen, wrapped in a threadbare wool blanket that looked as though it had been salvaged from a stable floor. The boy’s face was the pale green of an unripened plum, and his skin was slick with a thin, cold sweat despite the chill October air. Every few moments, his frame was wracked by a dry, hollow bark that rattled in his chest like loose dry peas in a bladder.

"That’s no winter cold," Thomas observed, stepping down from the catwalk to the narrow ledge along the stone wall. "That's the marsh-shake. He's taken the river-rot into his blood."

"He's lazy, is what he is," Clout muttered, though he looked at the boy with a flicker of uneasy concern. "Four days ago he was bright enough, eating his fill of beef and salt pudding. Now he can't lift a boat-hook without his knuckles going white as sheep-bones. Give us a measure of your physic, Thomas. I’ll throw a penny-worth of salt pork into your toll-basket."

"Keep your pork," Thomas said. "Bring the boy up to the bench while the basin fills."

The lock-keeper’s cottage sat twelve paces from the water’s edge, a low, thick-walled structure of flint and lime timbered with salvaged ship-oak. Its roof was thatched with river-reeds so old and dark that thick patches of emerald moss and house-leek grew along the ridge-pole. To the south of the doorway lay Thomas’s garden—a quarter-acre of black marsh soil enclosed by a wattled fence to keep out the towing horses and the wild pigs from the forest.

Unlike the neighboring cottagers, who grew only turnips, cabbage, and pale, woody leeks, Thomas’s plot was a dense, fragrant tangle of dark leaves, blue stalks, and dried seed-heads. There were neat rows of feverfew, its white-and-yellow buttons drying on the stalk; broad-leaved comfrey with its fat, hairy stems; tall spears of marsh-mallow; wormwood; yarrow; and three varieties of mint that filled the damp morning air with a sharp, medicinal clean smell whenever a boot crushed their trailing runners.

Thomas entered the dim, cool interior of his kitchen. The room smelled comfortably of wood-ash, dried lavender, and vinegar. From the low oak rafters hung scores of small bundles—herbs tied with hempen string, drying in the draft that swept through the chimneystack. There were bunches of dried elder-berries dark as currants, bundles of peeled willow-bark tied like bundles of cinnamon, and dry roots of valerian that gave off a faint, earth-and-leather scent.

He went to a long deal table near the window where his mortars stood. One was carved from a block of heavy, dark lignum-vitae brought home by a sailor nephew; the other was a deep, stone vessel he had dug out of the riverbed years ago, smooth as ice from centuries of water-wear.

He selected three strips of white willow-bark—harvested from the pollarded trees at the tail of the lock during the March sap-rise—and shaved them into fine, curled ribbons with his draw-knife. To these he added a dried head of feverfew, a pinch of crushed mustard seed, and a small handful of dried meadowsweet leaves.

"The willow takes the fire out of the bone," Thomas muttered to himself, repeating the couplet his grandmother had taught him forty years before in the hills of Essex. "The meadowsweet cools the belly's stew, the feverfew breaks the heat in two."

He tipped the mixture into a pewter pot, poured boiling water over it from the kettle that hung perpetually over the smoldering turf fire, and set it to steep on the hearth stone.

When he returned to the lock-side, the basin was nearly full. The water had risen to within a foot of the top ledge, carrying the heavy grain lighter up with it until Barnaby Clout’s wide, red face was level with Thomas’s boots. The boy was sitting on the wooden beam of the upper gate, his knees pulled up to his chin, shivering so violently that his heels clicked against the damp oak like castanets.

"Drink this, lad," Thomas said, handing him a battered horn mug full of the steaming, amber-colored liquor. "Drink it hot, and don't breathe until you've reached the dregs. It tastes like horse-gall, but it'll drive the ice out of your liver."

The boy took the mug with trembling hands. His fingernails, Thomas noted with a quiet frown, were a strange, dark bluish-gray, like the skin of a boiled mussel. He drank obediently, sputtering as the bitter willow-salicin and hot mustard hit his throat, but he cleared the cup to the bottom.

"Good lad," Barnaby Clout said, slapping the youth on the shoulder hard enough to send him off balance. "Now get you to the stern and hold the tiller while I cast off the head-line. Master Reed hasn't got all day to sit watching your nose drip."

Thomas stepped over to the lower windlass, knocked out the iron pawl with his heel, and turned the crank to lift the lower sluice-paddles. The dark water inside the chamber gave a great, gurgling sigh and began to pour out into the lower reach, driving a thick lather of yellow foam down toward the bend.

"How is the water up at Broxbourne?" Thomas asked as the lower gates slowly parted under the pressure of his shoulder.

Clout spat over his shoulder into the froth. "Low. Bad. The leather-dressers at Hertford have been dumping their lime-pits right into the main stream because the ditch-drains are choked. Smells like a dead horse in an oven all the way from Ware down to the Rye House. Two of John Skelton’s haulers took to their blankets at Hoddesdon on Tuesday with the same belly-grip this lad’s got. Must be the late mist coming off the fields."

"Aye," Thomas said, looking down at the dark, oily film that clung to the stonework of the lock pit as the water level dropped. "The mist is heavy this year. It stays in the hollows long after noon."

"It’s the air," Clout barked, leaning heavily against his tiller as the boat began to move out into the lower river. "A bad air came over from the Dutch coasts in August. You can taste it on your bread if you leave the tin un-lidded. Well, I’m obliged for the draught, Thomas! I'll leave a couple of copper farthings with the ale-wife at the Swan for you."

"Mind he stays dry," Thomas called after him. "And give him another draught of meadowsweet if his tongue turns black!"

The lighter drifted away into the gray bank of fog, her sweep creaking rhythmically in the row-locks until the sound was swallowed by the silence of the marshes.

Thomas stood alone on the lock-tail for a long time, watching the ripples die away against the banks. The water was remarkably dark—not the clear, tea-colored brown of peat water from the upper hills, nor the milky green of a summer chalk-stream, but a heavy, slate-colored fluid that seemed to move with a strange, oily slowness. Along the mud-line, where the tide had dropped six inches, a thin line of gray sediment lay like grease upon the grass.

He knelt by the lower gate, dipped his fingers into the stream, and brought them to his nose.

It didn't smell of dead fish, nor of marsh-gas, which was sharp and sulfurous like old eggs. It had a dull, heavy smell—like the water in a forge-trough where hot iron had been cooled fifty times over, mixed with the sour, stale tang of an unwashed beer-cask.

"The lime-pits," he muttered to himself, standing up and wiping his fingers on his apron. "The tanners are letting their wash run too free again. They'll kill the crayfish before Christmas if they aren't fined by the Conservancy."

He turned back toward his cottage. There was work to be done before the midday lighters arrived from Bow. The meadowsweet needed to be stripped from its dried stalks and packed into the stone jars, and his supply of willow-bark was running low.

As he walked past his small water-butt—fed by a wooden lead-spout that caught the rain from his cottage roof—he paused, filled a small wooden bowl, and poured it into his herb-patch around the base of a struggling liquorice plant. The garden was his pride, the one neat, green thing in a world of gray mud, brown timber, and black water.

Every boatman between Hertford and the Thames knew Thomas Reed’s lock. They knew him as a quiet, hard-handed man who charged his legal tolls without a farthing’s cheat, who could mend an iron paddle-bolt on his own small anvil, and who had a remedy in his stone jars for almost every ill that a wet, cold life on the river could bring upon a man.

He had cured old Simpkins of the bloody flux three summers ago with a decoction of tormentil and oak-bark; he had drawn the foul poison out of young Nat's leg when he had gouged it on a rusty boat-iron, using nothing more than a poultice of bruised comfrey and wild honey; and there wasn't a hauler on the towpath who hadn't taken his willow-tea for the bone-ague when the November rains settled into the Lea valley.

Thomas stepped inside, took down his heavy iron mortar, and sat down at the deal table. He took a handful of dried yarrow heads—white as bone, gathered from the dry banks above the marsh line—and began to work the heavy iron pestle with a slow, circular motion.

Grind. Crunch. Grind.

The dust rose up from the mortar, sweet and spicy, filling his nostrils and clearing the dull, heavy smell of the river from his head. He smiled quietly to himself in the dim room. Nature was simple enough if a man knew how to read her book. For every ill that rose out of the damp ground, the earth grew a leaf or a root to master it. The Almighty had laid the sickness in the cold mud, but He had set the cure right there on the bank beside it, growing green and quiet in the sun, waiting for a man with the eyes to see and the hand to gather.

Outside, down in the dark pit of the lock, the slick, gray water lapped softly against the oak gates, leaving its thin, oily ring of silt upon the stone.

By noon, the high curtain of mist had not vanished so much as it had curdled into a greasy, yellow-tinted wool that clung to the crowns of the alder trees. The wind, what little there was of it, blew from the southwest, carrying the stale, baked-grain smell of the malt-kilns at Hoddesdon across the flat expanse of the marsh. It was a heavy air, thick enough to leave a coat of moisture on the ironwork of the windlass within twenty minutes of Thomas wiping it dry with a handful of tow.

The lock was rarely quiet for more than an hour on a weekday. No sooner had the gray wake of Barnaby Clout’s barley-lighter settled into the reeds than the low, mournful blowing of a horn signaled another craft approaching from the north.

It was the Mary Rose, a broad-beamed oak hoy laden with forty tons of green timber from the woodland behind Waltham. Her owner, Samuel Vane, was a man whose skin had been tanned to the dark, oiled sheen of an old boot by forty years of open water between Hertford and the Thames pool. He stood at his tiller with his hat pulled low against the drizzle, his gray coat streaked with the white lime-crust that seemed to coat every rail and deck-plank along the lower Lea that autumn.

As the timber hoy nudged her stem into the upper bay, Thomas threw his shoulder against the balance beam to hold the gate steady. He looked down into the open hold, expecting to see Vane’s two grown sons busy with the fender-ropes. Only the younger boy, Matty, was on deck, fending off the stone quay with a long ash pole that shook visibly in his small, red hands.

"Where’s your brother, Sam?" Thomas called out, hooking his elbow over the oak beam as the upper basin began to draw down.

Samuel Vane did not answer immediately. He spit a stream of black tobacco juice into the froth that boiled around his rudder, then spat again, as if the taste in his mouth would not go away. When he looked up, his eyes were bloodshot, surrounded by dark, bruised ringlets of flesh that made him look a decade older than he had when he passed north three weeks before.

"In the cuddy," Vane growled, his voice rasping like a iron file drawn across green wood. "Laid out on a wool-sack since we left Stortford. Can’t stand his feet without his knees giving way like wet straw."

From the dark, low doorway of the hoy’s aft cabin came a sound that made Thomas pause with his hand on the paddle-jack. It was not the wet, rattling cough of a man who had taken a chill from a night in the rain, nor the sharp, bark-like cough of the pleurisy. It was a dry, hollow, scraping noise, like two dry roof-tiles being rubbed together in a sack. It went on and on, rising in a frantic, airless crescendo until it ended in a weak, gurgling gasp that sounded as if the boy were trying to draw breath through a pipe filled with wet sand.

"He’s been at that since Tuesday," Vane said, staring down at his own knuckles where they gripped the tiller rail. "Started with a tightness across his shoulder-blades. Thought he’d strained himself hauling against the tow-line at King’s Weir. But then the throat went dry—dry as an old chimney—and the fever came on."

"Did he take the water at Ware?" Thomas asked, stepping down to the bottom step of the lock-wall to get a closer look at the hoy’s deck.

"He takes what we all take," Vane said sourly. "A bucket out of the river when the beer-cask runs dry. There’s nothing wrong with the river water that a drop of malt won't mend, or hadn't used to be. But the lad drank three pewter pots of it off the stern on Sunday night because his tongue felt burnt. By morning he couldn't keep his bacon down, and his water was as dark as elderberry wine."

Thomas nodded slowly, his mind already sorting through the jars in his kitchen. "It's the autumn rot," he declared with the quiet authority of a man who had watched thirty years of river-mists rise and fall across the same two miles of marsh. "The long summer held the water back in the ditches. All the stagnant weeds and the dead leaves from the high woods have turned sour in the mud. When the first rains came up last week, they washed all that rottenness down into the main channel. It's a miasma, Sam. It gets into the bile and turns the blood thick."

"I don't care what it turns," Vane muttered, turning his face away to hide a sudden, involuntary shudder that ran through his broad shoulders. "I only know the boy can't turn a winch, and my own legs feel as if they've been filled with lead shot since yesterday morning. I’ve a rattling in my own ribs that wasn't there when we passed Bow."

As if to prove his words, Vane leaned over the tiller and was seized by the same dry, rhythmic barking that had come from the cabin. It was a wretched sound—hard, metallic, and entirely devoid of phlegm. He coughed until his dark face turned the color of a bruised plum and his eyes leaked big, clear tears that ran down through the gray stubble on his cheeks.

Thomas reached down, caught the hoy’s head-fast, and snubbed it firmly around the iron bollard. "Stay where you are, Sam. Don't go lifting those oak timbers until I've brought you a draught. You'll burst a vein in your lung if you pull on an oar with a chest like that."

He walked back across the narrow timber bridge toward his cottage, his iron-nailed boots clacking sharply against the wet oak. The air seemed colder now, though the sun was still a pale, watery disc behind the yellow fog overhead. In the hedge along his garden wall, the sparrows were strangely quiet, huddling in small, ragged balls among the thorn-twigs rather than darting after the midges that usually danced over the ditch.

Inside the kitchen, Thomas went straight to his shelves. The success of a physic, as his grandmother had often told him, lay not merely in the herbs themselves, but in the proportions. If the willow bark was the iron that held the cure together, the lungwort was the edge that cut through the thick phlegm, and the sweet marjoram was the oil that smoothed its passage down the throat.

He took down a large stoneware jar labeled with a charcoal mark—Pulmonaria—which he had gathered from the chalky woods near Epping the previous spring. Its leaves were speckled with white spots, resembling the spotted surface of an ailing lung; by the ancient rule of signatures, which God had written into the very shape of plants so that simple men might understand their uses, there was no better medicine for a chest that rasped like a saw.

He measured two generous handfuls into his wooden bowl. To this he added a handful of dried coltsfoot, three bruised cloves of garlic from the string above the hearth—garlic was sovereign against all vapors and pestilential airs—and a rounded spoon of crushed linseed to give the liquor a slick, soothing quality.

"A bad air," Thomas murmured as he poured boiling spring-water over the dried leaves. The steam rose up, thick with the pungent, sulfurous reek of the crushed garlic and the earthy, tea-like scent of the lungwort. "The river is full of bad air this side of the frost. But the herbs don't lie. God didn't make the lungs without making the leaf to clear them."

He took his heavy brass spoon and stirred the infusion until the fluid turned a deep, greenish brown, thick as thin gruel. While it steeped, he walked to the back door and looked out at his rain-butt.

The butt was a five-hundred-gallon oak tun that had once held Canary wine, set beneath the eaves to catch the clean runoff from the thatch. The water inside was clear and bright, free from the yellow slime that coated the river-banks. Thomas dipped his wooden ladle into it, brought it to his lips, and drank deeply. It was cold, sweet, and clean, tasting faintly of dried straw and smoke.

"Clean water," he said to himself, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "That’s what they lack on the boats. Drink from the river when the mud is high, and you drink the rot of ten miles of ditch."

He carried two large horn mugs of the hot brew back down to the lock. The hoy had lowered three feet into the pit, her wet pine sides glistening in the gloomy light like the skin of an eel.

Samuel Vane was sitting on the hatchway, his head resting against his knees, his shoulders trembling under his thick coat. In the doorway of the cabin, his elder son—a lad of nineteen named Robin—had crawled out into the open air. The young man was a terrible sight. His face was the gray color of dry river-clay, his lips were cracked and dark, and his fingers were hooked like iron claws into the collar of his shirt as he tried to draw breath.

"Here," Thomas said, handing the first mug down to Vane and the second to the young man. "Drink it while the steam is still rising. It has garlic to drive out the ditch-vapor and lungwort to open the pipes."

The young man took the mug, but his hands were shaking so violently that half the dark liquor spilled over his wrists before he could bring it to his mouth. When he did drink, he swallowed with a painful, gulping motion, his throat making a dry, clicking sound like a wooden latch.

"It tastes like old ditch-mud and horse-radish," Robin gasped, wiping his chin with a sleeve that was already stained with dark, spotty vomit.

"It tastes like life, you foolish lad," Thomas snapped, though his voice was gentler than his words. "Sit there and let the steam work into your chest. The garlic will search out the heat in your liver and bring it out through the skin."

He turned to the father. Vane had emptied his mug in three deep, desperate swallows, his big Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a float on a fishing line. Almost immediately, the heat of the hot liquid brought a flush of dull red to his leathery cheeks. He took a long, shivering breath—the first clear breath he had drawn in two days—and let it out with a deep sigh that smelled powerfully of pounded garlic.

"Ah," Vane grunted, wiping his watering eyes. "That bites. It stings all the way down to the belt."

"That’s the coltsfoot," Thomas said with a nod of satisfaction. "It finds the phlegm and tears it away from the flesh. You’ll cough up the dark stuff before nightfall, Sam, and by tomorrow morning your knees will be as stiff as oak again, but the heat will be gone."

"If it puts me back on my feet by tomorrow, Thomas, I'll bring you a load of birch-faggots from the forest for your winter fire," Vane said. He stood up, testing his legs against the tilt of the boat. He was still unsteady, his knees wobbling slightly like those of a newborn calf, but the agonizing cough had subsided into a low, dry ticking in his throat. "It’s a wonder, your medicine. There’s no apothecary in London could give a man a quicker ease."

"The apothecaries sell dried powders that have sat in jars since the King's grandfather was a boy," Thomas said, setting his empty mugs on the copestone. "They buy their roots from merchant ships that have been six months at sea. My herbs are pulled from the ground when the sun is on them, with the dew still wet on the leaf. There's life in them."

He stepped to the windlass and began to crank the lower paddle-gates open to release the hoy into the lower reach. The heavy oak gears groaned under his weight, the iron teeth clicking into the pawl with a sharp, rhythmic clack-clack-clack that echoed off the damp stone walls.

As the water level dropped, Thomas looked down once more into the lock pit.

The bottom of the chamber was lined with great flagstones of Kentish rag, laid down eighty years ago when the lock was first built by the King's engineers. Usually, when the water was drawn down, the stones showed brown and clear through the thin sheen of stream-water, with small green weeds trailing from the mortar joints like hair.

Today, however, as the dark volume poured away through the sluices, it left behind a thick, dull coating that hung to the stonework like wet tallow. It was not green, nor brown, but a pale, leaden gray that did not wash clean even where the current ran strongest. In the corners of the gates, where the foam collected into yellow rafts, small bubbles broke with a dull pop, releasing a puff of air that smelled distinctly of sour vinegar and burnt copperas.

Thomas reached down with his long ash-pole and scraped a line through the gray coating on the wall. The stuff came away on the tip of the wood in a thick, gelatinous curl that had no smell of its own, but felt strangely slippery between his finger and thumb—like fine flour mixed with oil.

"The tanneries," he muttered under his breath, watching the gray curl float away without breaking up. "They’re using some new lime on the hides up at Ware. It’s too heavy for the stream to carry off."

He watched the timber hoy drift slowly out through the lower gates, her stern-oar creaking as Vane swung her round the marsh-bend toward Old Ford. From down the channel, half a mile away through the yellow mist, came the sound of another horn—two short, flat blasts that meant a train of hay-barges was waiting at the lower turn.

And then, faintly across the silent water, came another sound.

It was not a horn, nor the splash of an oar, nor the heavy clatter of a horse’s iron shoe on the gravel towpath. It was a cough.

Then another.

Two voices, three voices, answering each other across the damp expanse of the river-meadows like frogs in a ditch—dry, rattling, metallic barks that rose through the cold air and died away into the foggy distance.

Thomas stood on the catwalk, his heavy wooden beetle held loose in his hand, his gray eyes scanning the curved line of the river bank where the tall reeds stood motionless in the dead air.

"It's everywhere this morning," he said to himself, a tiny flicker of unease stirring in his chest before he pushed it down with the easy confidence of a master of his craft. "The whole river is full of the damp rot. I’ll have to brew the big copper pot before dusk if I’m to have enough lungwort for the evening lighters."

He turned back toward his cottage, his hand already reaching for his pocket-knife to sharpen the blade for another harvest of willow-bark along the bank. The water in the lock-pit below him swirled slowly in its dark, stone bed, black as ink, silent as tallow, carrying its secret burden down toward the Thames.