The Lock-Keeper's Lament: A Satire of Two Eras

• Chapter 1 The Keeper of Keys and Grudges
• Chapter 2 A Bargeman’s Drift into Trouble
• Chapter 3 Iron Rails and Wooden Thoughts
• Chapter 4 The Sluice of All Evils
• Chapter 5 A Tale Told from the Towpath
• Chapter 6 Waterway Wit and Bureaucracy
• Chapter 7 The Steam-Powered Spectre
• Chapter 8 Windlasses and Whiskey
• Chapter 9 Mud, Muddle, and Mayhem
• Chapter 10 Two Men in a Ditch
• Chapter 11 The Weigh-House Wager
• Chapter 12 High Water and Low Cunning
• Chapter 13 The Inspector’s Spectacles
• Chapter 14 Knots, Nuisances, and Navvies
• Chapter 15 An Ill-Advised Cargo
• Chapter 16 The Toll-House Tribunal
• Chapter 17 Paddle Up, Paddle Down
• Chapter 18 A Convergence of Clowns
• Chapter 19 Echoes Under the Aqueduct
• Chapter 20 Sabotage at Seven Stitches
• Chapter 21 The Great Dredging Disaster
• Chapter 22 In Defense of Stagnant Water
• Chapter 23 The Collision of Courses
• Chapter 24 Floating on Thin Ice
• Chapter 25 The Committee Meets the Current
• Chapter 26 The Lock Gates Close at Last

To the untrained eye, Grimble’s Lock on the Junction Canal was merely a damp stone trough equipped with two rotting oak gates, a cottage that smelled permanently of boiled cabbage, and a stretch of murky brown water that moved with all the urgency of a sleeping ox. To Mr. Bartholomew Flathers, however, it was the pivot upon which the entire British Empire balanced its prosperity.

Flathers was fifty-four years of age, possessed a spine that appeared to have been fashioned from a seasoned ash pole, and had served the Canal Company for twenty-seven years without once permitting himself the luxury of a smile while on duty. Smiles, in Flathers’ carefully constructed worldview, were the first visible sign of laxity, and laxity was the gateway through which flood, bankruptcy, and moral ruin inevitably flooded the land.

On this particular June morning in the year of our Lord 1854, the sun rose over the Berkshire hills with a golden splendor that Flathers found distinctly suspicious. Clear skies meant heat; heat meant evaporation; evaporation meant low water; and low water brought out the absolute worst in boatmen. He stepped out onto the gravel path of his cottage, wearing his double-breasted indigo blue jacket—complete with the polished brass buttons that bore the embossed crest of the Junction Navigation Company—and pulled his iron-rimmed spectacles from his waistcoat pocket.

He performed his morning inspection with the grim solemnity of an admiral surveying a line of battle. First, he checked the water level against the painted white gauge on the upper wing-wall. The level stood at four feet, eleven and three-quarter inches. A quarter-inch low. He made a mental note to blame the lock-keeper three miles up-river at Oakhanger, a notorious drunkard who was known to drop his paddles fifteen minutes early if there was a tavern within walking distance.

Next, he inspected the balance beams. The oak timbers, thirty feet long and heavy enough to squash an elephant, were sound, though the paint was peeling near the iron bands. Flathers produced a small leather-bound notebook from his inside pocket. This was not the Company’s official ledger, which was kept on the high desk in his parlor and was reserved for tonnage figures, toll receipts, and sober facts. This was his private book—a worn, dog-eared volume bound in greasy calfskin, known to Flathers simply as the Record of Infractions, and to his long-suffering wife as "Bartholomew’s List of Grudges."

In this smaller volume, written in an ink so dark and acidic it threatened to eat through the paper, were recorded twenty-seven years of petty grievances, insolent remarks, improperly snubbed ropes, and unchristian language directed at him by the floating vagrants who navigated the canal.

"June 4th," Flathers muttered to himself, turning a page with a thumb hardened by decades of handling wet hemp and cold iron. "Job Harrison, master of the narrowboat The Flying Fish, did willfully and with malice aforethought permit his mule to consume three mouthfuls of Company grass from the northern embankment. Upon being admonished, the said Harrison suggested I immerse my head in a bucket of slops."

Flathers adjusted his spectacles and looked down the long, straight cut of the canal. The water was as smooth as a polished sheet of slate, reflecting the pale sky and the drooping willow branches on the far towpath. In the distance, a quarter of a mile away, a thin smudge of grey smoke drifted above the tree line. A boat was approaching.

Flathers pulled out his pocket watch—a silver turnip of formidable weight—and checked the time. Seven-twenty-two AM. If it was Harrison, he was eighteen minutes behind his usual schedule, which meant the man had undoubtedly spent the previous evening at The Anchor in Marshfield, squandering his master’s freight money on dark ale and skittles.

"Prudence!" Flathers called out over his shoulder, not turning toward the cottage door.

Mrs. Flathers, a small, bird-like woman whose primary role in life was to serve as an uncritical audience for her husband’s endless treatises on hydraulic head-pressure, appeared at the window. She was holding a wooden spoon and smelled faintly of flour.

"Yes, Bartholomew?"

"The scum is moving," Flathers announced flatly, pointing a gnarled finger down the towpath. "Fetch the brass windlass key and the heavy toll-book. It is Harrison, or I am a Dutchman. I can hear his rope slapping against the turf as if he owned the soil of England."

In truth, the sound was barely audible to anyone whose ears had not been refined by nearly three decades of listening for trespassers. But Flathers possessed an extraordinary sensory apparatus when it came to canal transit. He could distinguish the draft of a boat by the pitch of the wake against the stone wall; he could judge the weight of a cargo of Staffordshire coal within two hundredweight merely by observing the depth of the hull in the water; and he could spot a cracked paddle-gear from forty paces in a thick fog.

He walked slowly down to the upper gate, his heavy boots crunching rhythmically on the crushed limestone. The upper gate was closed, its massive wooden beams fitted together with a tongue-and-groove tight enough to hold back a deluge, provided the bottom sill hadn't been jammed by an accumulation of discarded boots, dead dogs, or river weeds.

Flathers stood on the narrow wooden planking that spanned the top of the gate, leaning his arms upon the balance beam. From this elevated perch, he commanded a view of his domain. To his left was the lock chamber itself—a dark, stone-lined abyss, sixteen feet deep, forty feet long, currently filled to the brim with twenty thousand gallons of heavy, dark water. To his right was the bypass channel, where the surplus water gurgled through an iron grating with a wet, flatulent noise that Flathers considered the only truly honest sound in the parish.

The smoke above the trees grew thicker, and presently the bow of a narrowboat poked its nose around the bend. It was painted in the bright, gaudy colors favored by the boatfolk—crimson red, sky blue, and bright yellow, decorated with crude pictures of castles that looked like fat turnips and roses that looked like cabbage heads. Flathers sneered. He despised canal art. In his view, a boat ought to be painted black, numbered clearly with white lead paint, and treated as a temporary wooden box for the conveyal of goods, not a floating gypsy circus.

The vessel in question was the Water Witch, a seventy-foot wooden narrowboat laden high with barrels of whale oil and crates of metalware bound for London. Walking along the towpath beside the horse—a skeletal, bay gelding with one drooping ear and a posture that suggested impending collapse—was a young man in a corduroy waistcoat and a flat cap pushed back on his forehead. He was whistling a vulgar street ballad with alarming vigor.

Steering the boat from the long wooden tiller at the stern was a figure Flathers recognized instantly, despite his best hopes that the man had sunk somewhere in the muddy depths of the Wilts and Berks Canal.

It was Ephraim "Sly-Jack" Pegg.

Pegg was forty-five, possessed a red nose that had clearly required years of dedicated effort to cultivate, and wore a coat that appeared to have been sewn together from three different suits stolen from three men of vastly different sizes. He was currently leaning against the tiller with an air of sublime indifference to the laws of physics, the regulations of the Navigation Board, and the general moral order of the universe.

"Morning to you, Mr. Flathers!" Pegg roared as the boat glided toward the lock entry. "A grand, glorious, copper-bottomed morning for the trade! The birds are singing, the fish are jumping, and the water is nearly deep enough to float a walnut!"

Flathers did not move an inch. He remained motionless on the balance beam, looking down at Pegg through his spectacles with the cold, unblinking detachment of a heron contemplating an particularly greasy toad.

"You are carrying too much speed, Pegg," Flathers said, his voice dropping into the low, gravelly register he reserved for felons and non-paying boaters. "Check your way before you smash my lower cill. If you put so much as a scratch on that iron fender, I’ll have the Constable on you before you reach Reading."

"Scratch it?" Pegg feigned deep heart-struck hurt, placing a large, dirty hand over his waistcoat. "Me? Touch your beautiful woodwork? Why, Mr. Flathers, I treat this lock with more tenderness than I treat my own dear mother. Softer than a feather bed, we’re coming in. Go steady there, Tom!"

The young lad on the towpath gave the horse’s reins a slight jerk. The horse, which seemed to possess far more common sense than its master, slowed its pace to a dead crawl. The heavy wooden craft glided into the masonry mouth of the lock chamber with a soft, wet sloshing sound, missing the stone walls by less than three inches on either side.

Flathers stepped down off the beam, his windlass key gripped in his right hand like a marshal’s baton. He walked alongside the stone coping as the boat settled into the dark pit.

"Whale oil," Flathers barked, sniffing the air with profound distaste. "Fourteen tons, by the look of her line. Tonnage declaration, if you please, Pegg. And don't give me any of your fairy tales about lighter loads."

Pegg fished inside his filthy coat and produced a crumpled, grease-stained sheet of paper, which he tossed up toward the lock-keeper. Flathers caught it between two fingers as if it were infected with the cholera, unfolded it, and held it at arm's length.

"Signed at Devizes," Flathers read aloud, his brow furrowing into a series of deep, suspicious trenches. "Thirteen tons, eight hundredweight. And what is in those four extra barrels stowed behind the cabin bulkhead?"

"Rainwater, Mr. Flathers," Pegg said cheerfully, taking a short clay pipe from his pocket and unceremoniously spitting over the side into the lock water. "For washing the deck. We like to keep things tidy for the Company. Cleanliness is next to godliness, as the vicar says."

"Rainwater does not smell of lard, Pegg," Flathers retorted, stepping to the edge of the chamber and pointing down with his iron key. "It is tallow. Unmanifested tallow. That is a class-three goods infraction under the Act of 1842. I shall note it."

He immediately produced his calfskin book, rested it on the cold granite wall of the lock, and began to write with furious precision.

Pegg sighed, leaning back against his tiller and shaking his head with an expression of affectionate pity. "You know, Bartholomew—if I may call you Bartholomew—"

"You may not," Flathers snapped without looking up. "You will address me as Master Flathers, or Lock-Keeper Flathers, as prescribed in the Company Bye-Laws, Section Four, Paragraph Nine."

"Well now, Master Flathers," Pegg continued, unruffled, "you’re spending all your breath counting my tallow barrels and writing in your little black book of sins, while the whole wide world is changing around you. Did you go down to the turnpike road yesterday?"

Flathers blew on his wet ink, closed the notebook with a sharp leather snap, and tucked it back into his jacket. "I have no business with roads. Roads are for peddlers, cows, and men who cannot afford the carriage rates of a proper water-way."

"Ah, but it isn't a road I’m talking about," Pegg said, his small, dark eyes glinting with mischievous delight. "It’s the iron rails. They’ve laid the tracks all the way through the valley from Didcot. I saw it myself three days ago. A great black iron kettle on wheels, puffing out black smoke like the belly of hell, pulling twenty wagons of coal at thirty miles an hour. Thirty miles an hour, Flathers! You couldn't run thirty miles an hour if a bull were chasing you through a thorn hedge."

Flathers took a slow, deep breath. His nostrils flared slightly. He had heard rumors of these "rail-ways"—terrible, noisy, ungodly contrivances built by madmen in top hats—but he had deliberately chosen to treat them as a temporary delusion, like the South Sea Bubble or the belief that tomatoes were fit for human consumption.

"Iron rails," Flathers said with terrifying quietness, "are an absurdity. Water was created by Almighty God on the third day of Creation. Iron rails were hammered together by Irishmen in dirty trousers. Water does not wear out. Water does not explode. Water does not require grease on its axles. A boat carried upon five feet of stable canal water is the natural, dignified, and proper method for moving heavy freight across the realm."

"That’s as may be," Pegg replied, taking out a tinder-box and striking a spark to his pipe. "But the iron kettle doesn't stop for locks. It doesn't pay twelve pence a ton at every turnpike house, and it doesn't care if the upper reach at Oakhanger is two inches low because the lock-keeper was drunk at The Black Dog."

Flathers stiffened. The mention of Oakhanger’s water depth struck too close to his professional pride.

"The Junction Canal," Flathers pronounced, stepping over to the paddle-rack and fitting his brass windlass onto the square iron spindle, "has stood for sixty years. It was designed by Mr. Rennie himself. It is a monument to civil order. Now hold your craft, Pegg, while I drop the lower sluice, or I will drop it so fast the surge will pop the timbers of your cabin."

He engaged the iron pawl and began to wind the handle. The heavy cast-iron gears groaned, protesting the friction, before reluctantly lifting the wooden paddle deep beneath the surface. With a terrible, muffled roar, thousands of gallons of dark green water rushed out through the lower culvert, churning the quiet basin below into a boiling cauldron of white foam.

The Water Witch began to sink slowly into the stone pit. Pegg stood casually at the tiller, adjusting his balance as the boat dropped inch by inch between the dripping, moss-covered walls.

"You can crank that iron all you like, Master Flathers," Pegg called up through the rising mist of water-spray, his voice echoing off the wet masonry. "But they’re building a station house at Slough. A big one, made of red brick with glass windows. And the directors of the Great Western Railway are saying they'll be carrying coal from Wales to London in eight hours flat."

"Eight hours!" Flathers snorted, cranking the second paddle up to its highest notch with a loud clack-clack-clack of the iron catch. "Pure, unadulterated puffery! No cargo of quality ought to travel at such a speed. It agitates the goods. Coal carried at thirty miles an hour arrives as dust; beer carried at thirty miles an hour arrives as vinegar. A proper barrel of porter requires three days of gentle, rhythmic bobbing on a quiet canal to bring its flavors to maturity. Anyone knows that."

"The London brewers don't seem to think so," Pegg said, his voice now coming from deep down in the shadows of the lock floor, six feet below where Flathers stood. "They’re signing contracts with the steam-men. I heard it from a clerk in Reading."

Flathers spat onto the coping stone. "Clerks in Reading know nothing of navigation. They are soft-handed scribblers who spend their lives sitting on leather cushions. When the iron rails rust away in the winter damp—which they undoubtedly will—and when those iron kettles burst their boilers and scatter their passengers across the cabbage fields, the merchants of England will come crawling back to the Junction Canal on their knees, begging Mr. Rennie's memory for forgiveness."

He walked to the far end of the lock wall, grasped the heavy oak balance beam of the lower gate, and pressed his back against it. He dug his heels into the gravel, straining his legs against the weight. The massive timber resisted for a second, then yielded with a long, wet sigh as the gate swung open into the lower reach.

The water in the lock was now level with the canal below. The Water Witch sat low in the scum-covered ditch, its deck level with the lower stone sill.

"There," Flathers said, wiping a bead of sweat from his nose with his sleeve. "You are lowered. You have consumed eighteen thousand gallons of Company water, for which your owners will be billed three shillings and fourpence at the Marshfield toll-office. Move along, Pegg. You are blocking the passage."

Pegg gave a sharp whistle to the lad on the towpath. The bay horse strained against its leather collar, the tow-line snapped taut, dripping water onto the mud, and the narrowboat began its slow, sluggish crawl out of the lock chamber.

As the vessel's stern cleared the gate posts, Pegg leaned over the tiller and offered Flathers a mock salute with his clay pipe.

"We’ll see, Master Flathers," Pegg called back, his voice drifting across the water as the boat moved down the long green cut. "We’ll see who’s left standing when the iron horse comes roaring through the valley. You keep your brass key polished, mind! You might need it to turn the lock on your own cottage when the Company sells it off for scrap!"

Flathers watched him go, his face as hard and expressionless as a milestone. He did not deign to reply. It was beneath the dignity of an employee of the Junction Navigation Company to engage in shouting matches with a man whose vessel smelled of illicit lard and whose horse appeared to be held together entirely by dried mud and habit.

When the boat was a hundred yards distant, Flathers walked deliberately back to the lower gate, pushed it closed with a dull, heavy thud, and engaged the drop-paddles to reset the chamber.

He pulled out his little calfskin notebook once more, opened it to the page marked Pegg, E., and added a fresh entry in his small, crabbed handwriting:

June 12th, 1854. Said Pegg did express treasonable and seditious opinions regarding the utility of iron steam-carriages, designed to cause alarm and despondency among Company officers. Also noted: vessel heavily laden with uninspected lard-tallow. Recommended fine: Five Shillings.

He closed the book, restored it to his pocket, and stood on the lock edge, surveying his kingdom.

The sun was higher now, beating down upon the quiet ditch of water. A yellow butterfly fluttered lazily over the lower gates, alighting for a moment on the iron ironwork before drifting off toward the meadows. Everything was quiet. Everything was ordered. Everything was precisely as it had been in 1798, and precisely as Bartholomew Flathers intended it to remain until the end of recorded time.

Then, faint and distant, carried on the warm southern breeze from three miles across the valley, came a sound Flathers had never heard before.

It was not the cheerful toot of a boatman’s horn, nor the soft splash of an oar, nor the rhythmic clatter of horse-shoes on gravel. It was a high, thin, screeching wail—a harsh, metallic scream that seemed to tear through the quiet morning air like a saw cutting through bone, followed by a low, rhythmic thump-thump-thump-thump that vibrated faintly through the very stone coping beneath his boots.

Flathers lowered his spectacles and stared toward the southern horizon, where a line of tall wooden posts had recently been erected across the green fields.

A tiny plume of thick, black smoke was crawling along the base of the distant hills, moving at a speed that was not merely unnatural, but distinctly offensive to any right-thinking Englishman.

Flathers adjusted his official cap, tightened his grip on his brass windlass key, and turned his back on the valley.

"Nonsense," he said aloud to the empty air. "A temporary nuisance. It will all be gone by Michaelmas."

If Bartholomew Flathers was the self-appointed high priest of the Junction Navigation Company, Ephraim “Sly-Jack” Pegg was its most unrepentant heretic. To Pegg, the canal was not a sacred vein of empire to be measured in inches of water and drams of cargo; it was simply a sixty-mile ditch full of slow-moving liquid provided by a merciful Providence for the explicit purpose of moving heavy things from place to place with the minimum possible expenditure of human energy.

As the Water Witch cleared the masonry tail-walls of Grimble’s Lock, Pegg let out a long, whistle-like sigh that smelled powerfully of damp shag tobacco and cheap gin. He rested his right thigh against the heavy oak tiller, pushed his greasy cap back to expose a forehead as craggy and pale as a turnip, and took a deep, satisfying drag from his short clay pipe.

"Old Flathers is getting stiffer in the joints," Pegg observed aloud to the empty air, or perhaps to the stern cabin skylight, which was painted with a somewhat lopsided depiction of Windsor Castle surrounded by pink cabbages meant to represent roses. "If he gets any stiffer, they’ll be able to paint him green and use him for a balance beam when the old ones rot out."

Ten yards ahead on the muddy towpath, the boy Tom gave no sign of having heard. Tom was fourteen years of age, possessed a pair of boots four sizes too large for him—rescued from a silted culvert near Devizes—and walked with a perpetual forward tilt, as though he were permanently trying to outrun his own shadow. In his right hand, he held a peeling ash switch, which he used occasionally to tap the flank of Prince, the boat’s solitary horse.

Prince was an animal of mysterious origins and extraordinary economy. He was nominally a bay, though large patches of his hide had long since turned the exact shade of towpath mud. He moved with a rhythmic, hypnotic plod that suggested he had suspended all higher brain functions somewhere around the turn of the century and was now operating entirely by momentum and dark instinct.

"Don't let him eat the buttercups, Tom!" Pegg bellowed down the line. "The buttercups give him the wind, and when Prince gets the wind, we might as well be towed by a steam-engine for all the peace we get on the back deck."

"He ain't eating buttercups, Mr. Pegg," Tom called back without turning his head. "He’s just smelling 'em. He likes the smell."

"Smelling 'em is the first step to chewing 'em, and chewing 'em is the gateway to colic," Pegg declared, leaning back against the tiller with an air of profound veterinary authority. "A horse on the cut is like an officer of the law—the moment he starts taking an interest in the flowers, the whole system breaks down."

The Water Witch glided along the narrow cut at a leisurely two miles an hour. The water here was dark and glassy, bordered on either side by thick banks of reeds, flowering rush, and the occasional water-rat that scurried into the silt at the boat's approach. To a man who spent his life on the water, every hundred yards of the canal had its own character, its own hazards, and its own opportunities.

There were the "long reaches," where a man could wedged a wooden block under the tiller, light his pipe, and take a twenty-minute nap while the horse followed the bank like a locomotive on iron rails. There were the "crooked cuts," where the water ran shallow over sunken gravel bars and a heavy wooden hull would grind to a dead halt with a sound like tearing linen if the steerer lost his concentration for three seconds. And then there were the "toll-houses," which Pegg regarded with the same wary, calculating hatred a fox reserves for a well-built chicken coop.

At forty-five, Ephraim Pegg had been on the water since his father had plucked him out of a bilge-bucket at the age of six. He knew the weight of every bridge arch between Bristol and the Thames; he knew which lock-keepers could be bribed with a couple of fresh eels caught in the night-lines, and which ones—like Flathers—required a formal display of submissive paperwork and an absolute minimum of physical contact.

He also knew that the four extra barrels stowed behind his cabin bulkhead were not, as he had so cheerfully informed Flathers, filled with soft rainwater for Deck-washing. They contained sixty gallons of illicitly distilled malt spirit, tucked neatly beneath three layers of honest Wiltshire tallow. The spirit belonged to a gentlemen’s club in Reading that preferred its liquor unencumbered by the heavy excise duties imposed by Her Majesty’s government, and Pegg was receiving eighteen shillings for its delivery—provided, of course, that it arrived without being tasted, seized, or dropped into sixteen feet of muddy water.

"It’s all a game of balances, you see," Pegg muttered to himself, squinting down the bright, sunny line of the cut. "Flathers balance his books; I balance my boat. He gets the ink, I get the eighteen shillings. It’s a very proper division of labor."

A mile below Grimble’s Lock, the canal widened into a shallow basin known as the Oakhanger Slack. Here, the artificial ditch met a sluggish natural stream that fed the main channel through an iron sluice gate. It was a dark, greasy stretch of water, overhung by weeping willows whose lower branches trailed in the scum like dead men's fingers.

As the Water Witch rounded the bend into the Slack, Pegg’s practiced eye caught sight of something that made him pull his clay pipe out of his mouth with a sharp clicking sound against his teeth.

Moored directly across the narrow channel, resting broadside in the shallow mud with its bow thrust into the reeds, was a long, low timber raft. It was loaded with heavy, unbarked oak trunks bound for the naval yards, and it occupied precisely four-fifths of the navigable waterway. Sitting on top of the highest log, wearing a ragged beaver hat and skinning a cold boiled turnip with a pocketknife, was a man Pegg knew all too well.

It was "Red-nosed" Dan Higgins—a rival carrier whose capacity for incompetence was legendary along the entire length of the Junction Navigation.

"Ahoy! You great greasy lump of mud!" Pegg shouted, his voice ringing across the stagnant basin. "What do you think you’re doing with that floating timber yard? Is this a public highway or your private duck pond?"

Higgins looked up slowly from his turnip, wiped his thumb across his sleeve, and squinted through the midday glare.

"Hold your horses, Pegg," Higgins replied in a thick, wet drawl that sounded as if he were speaking through a mouthful of warm porridge. "I’m aground. Settled tight on the gravel bar. The water’s dropped three inches since nine o'clock."

"Dropped three inches?" Pegg spat into the canal. "It hasn't dropped three inches, you blind turnip-gatherer! You’ve taken too deep a draft on those green oaks and tried to turn her before you reached the wide water. Get a pike-pole and push her off!"

"Tried that," Higgins said comfortably, taking a slow bite of his turnip. "Broke the pole. The gravel’s got a grip on her keel like a iron vise. You’ll just have to wait till the afternoon feed comes down from the upper lock."

Pegg’s face turned from its usual ruddy pink to a rich, alarming crimson that rivaled the painted roses on his cabin door. Wait? Wait for the afternoon feed? That meant standing in the scorching heat for three hours while Flathers slowly stroked his beard, checked his ledger, and debated whether releasing six inches of water was consistent with the long-term financial stability of the Junction Canal Board.

More importantly, it meant three hours sitting in the direct line of sight of the turnpike bridge, where the local excise officer was known to take his afternoon stroll with a pair of brass spyglasses and a very suspicious disposition.

"I can't wait, you soft-headed toad!" Pegg roared, stepping forward on his deck and waving his windlass key in the air. "I’ve got fourteen tons of urgent whale oil for the lamps of London! If the Queen’s streetlamps go dark on Tuesday night because of your oak logs, they’ll hang you from the yardarm at Deptford!"

"Let 'em hang," Higgins said, chewing methodically. "It’ll save me paying the rent on my cottage."

Pegg swore a magnificent, compound oath that involved Higgins’s ancestry, the anatomical deficiencies of timber-merchants, and the probable spiritual fate of the entire Higgins family unto the fourth generation. Then he turned to the front of the boat.

"Tom!" he yelled.

"Sir?" the boy called back, stopping Prince on the towpath.

"Hold the line short! We’re going to nudge him!"

"Nudge him, Mr. Pegg?" Tom looked doubtful, gazing at the massive, immovable mountain of green timber sitting in the mud. "Prince ain't feeling very nudgy today, sir. His legs are a bit hollow."

"Never mind his legs! Give him a flick of the ash-stick and tell him it’s oats at Reading! We’ll put the stem-fender right into his midships and slide him off the bar."

What Pegg failed to take into account—or chose, in the heat of his operational fury, to ignore—was the simple law of hydraulic momentum. The Water Witch, loaded with fourteen tons of lard, oil, and illicit liquor, possessed a total displacement that no shallow gravel bar could lightly dismiss.

Prince was given the ash-stick; he gave a desperate, wheezing grunt; the tow-line went as tight as a fiddle-string, dripping green canal water into the air; and the Water Witch accelerated from its peaceful two miles an hour to a terrifying, unstoppable three-and-a-half.

"Steady!" shouted Higgins, suddenly dropping his turnip and scrambling to his feet on the log. "Steady, you madman! You’ll split my binding ropes!"

"Clear the way for the Junction Express!" Pegg screamed, his hat flying off his head into the bilge as he grabbed the tiller with both hands to keep the bow straight.

The collision was not so much a smash as a prolonged, wet, grinding catastrophe.

The heavy oak fender at the stem of the Water Witch struck the central log of Higgins's raft with a sound like a small cannon going off in a damp basement. The timber raft, far from sliding gracefully off the gravel bar into deeper water, behaved like a bundle of gigantic wooden spillikins. The main binding chains snapped with a series of sharp, metallic pings, and four massive oak trunks, each weighing nearly two tons, rolled violently into the channel.

One trunk shot forward like a greased ram, caught the lower edge of the towpath bank, and gouged out a thirty-foot furrow of soft mud, clay, and grass, which promptly collapsed into the canal with a heavy sploosh.

Another trunk rolled backward, struck the hull of the Water Witch just below the waterline with a dull, hollow thump, and sent a shockwave through the boat that lifted Pegg six inches off the deck and sent his pipe flying into the reeds.

In the cabin below, six crates of ironware shifted four inches to the left, two lard barrels rolled three inches to the right, and one of the stone jars containing the excise-free malt spirit tipped off its shelf, hit the iron stove, and cracked wide open with a sharp, sickening clink.

Within five seconds, the small cabin was filled with the rich, unmistakable, eighty-proof aroma of un-taxed Wiltshire moonshine, which began to leak slowly through the floorboards into the bilge water below.

"My leg!" screamed Higgins, who had been thrown off his perch into eighteen inches of black silt and was now sitting up to his waist in weeds, covered in duckweed and mud. "My leg’s broken! My raft’s ruined! Murder! Piracy on the Navigation!"

Pegg, recovering his balance on the stern deck, ignored the roaring Higgins and sniffed the air. His long, red nose twitched once, twice, like a hound picking up the scent of a fox.

"Oh, sweet Lord above," Pegg whispered, his face turning pale despite the summer heat. "The malt."

He scrambled down the small wooden ladder into the dark, cramped cabin. The smell was overpowering—a heavy, sweet fumes that hit his lungs like a hot poker. A clear, yellowish stream of liquid was trickling across the floorboards toward the bilge-pump well.

"Tom!" Pegg yelled, popping his head out of the cabin hatch like a jack-in-the-box. "Tom! Stop the horse! Stop the horse and fetch the bucket!"

"Is the boat sinking, Mr. Pegg?" Tom shouted back, holding Prince’s head as the horse stood shivering on the newly ruined towpath.

"Worse than that!" Pegg gasped, ducking back down to mop up the spilled liquor with an old flannel shirt he retrieved from his bedding. "We’re leaking money! We’re leaking five shillings a pint!"

For the next ten minutes, the Oakhanger Slack was the scene of an extraordinary industrial effort. While Higgins sat in the mud shouting threats about the County Assizes, the Admiralty, and the Board of Works, Pegg lay flat on his stomach in the bilge of the Water Witch, furiously wringing out his flannel shirt into a pewter mug and pouring the salvaged spirit back into an empty oil tin.

By the time he emerged back onto the deck, his clothes were soaked in a mixture of bilgewater, whale oil, and high-proof spirits, making him smell like a very drunk lantern-lighter.

He climbed up to the stern deck, took the tiller, and looked at the channel ahead.

The collision had indeed cleared a path, but at a terrible cost. The timber raft was broken into three pieces; two giant logs were floating freely down the channel like wooden torpedoes; thirty yards of the Company towpath had been converted into a liquid mud-slide; and the water level in the slack was already beginning to drop as the churned-up silt clogged the lower culvert entrance.

"You’ll swing for this, Ephraim Pegg!" Higgins screamed from the bank, where he was now trying to drag himself out of the water by clutching a thicket of stinging nettles. "I’m going straight to Master Flathers! I’m going to have him write this down in his black book! Every line of it!"

Pegg wiped his brow with his wet, spirit-scented sleeve. The mention of Flathers’s name acted on him like a splash of cold water.

If Flathers found out about this—if he came down to inspect the damage to the towpath and caught one whiff of the Water Witch’s bilges—the result would not merely be a five-shilling fine for improper steering. It would be the immediate seizure of the vessel, the confiscation of the cargo, six months in Reading Gaol for smuggling, and the total ruin of Pegg’s long, distinguished, and entirely unprincipled career on the water.

"Tom!" Pegg barked, his voice dropping into an urgent, low hiss. "Get Prince moving! Don't look at him! Don't look at the logs! Keep moving toward the turnpike!"

"What about Mr. Higgins, sir?" Tom asked, looking back at the muddy figure swearing in the nettles. "Ain't we going to pull him out?"

"Mr. Higgins is an independent operator taking a temporary bath for his health," Pegg declared, thrusting his hip against the tiller as the boat squeezed past the remains of the raft with a wet, sucking noise. "It’s good for his skin. Improves his complexion. Now move along, before the water drops any lower!"

The Water Witch crept out of the basin, leaving behind it a trail of ruined earth, floating oak timber, and a small, iridescent oil-slick that shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow in the mid-day sun.

Pegg stood at the helm, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He reached into his coat for his pipe, remembered it was currently sitting at the bottom of the slack, and muttered a dark curse against timber-merchants, short waterways, and the entire system of inland navigation.

Then, as if to complete his misery, he heard it again.

It was louder now—much louder than it had been at Grimble’s Lock.

From over the low green crest of the railway embankment, less than half a mile to the south, came the deep, thundering clack-clack, clack-clack of iron wheels riding on iron rails. A second later, a magnificent, terrifying cloud of brilliant white steam erupted into the blue sky, followed by the shrill, triumphantly piercing whistle of a broad-gauge locomotive.

Pegg turned his head and watched through the gap in the willow trees.

The train was moving across the valley like a black iron dragon, pulling twelve gleaming wooden carriages and six flat-trucks loaded high with neatly stacked timber. It was moving so fast that the shadows of its smoke-clouds could barely keep up with it across the yellow buttercup fields. In ten seconds—ten brief, terrifying seconds—it covered a distance that would have taken the Water Witch forty minutes of hard pulling, three arguments with lock-keepers, and half a pint of spilled spirits to accomplish.

As the train vanished behind the church spire at Marshfield, its whistle gave one final, derisive screech that echoed off the hills like the laugh of a mechanical giant.

Pegg looked down at his own boat. He looked at the slow, muddy wake behind him; he looked at Prince’s drooping ears and hollow flanks; he looked at his own oily, spirit-soaked trousers.

For forty years, Ephraim Pegg had believed that the world was built on water—that as long as rain fell from the sky and ran down the hills into Mr. Rennie’s channels, a clever man with a fast horse and a slow conscience could always make a living.

Now, standing on the deck of his leaking boat in the middle of a ruined channel, smelling of illicit gin and facing the certainty of Flathers’s wrath, he felt a strange, cold flutter of doubt in his belly.

"Iron," Pegg whispered to himself, watching the white steam dissolve into the warm summer air. "Iron and steam and thirty miles an hour."

He shook his head, pulled his hat down hard over his ears, and leaned his full weight against the tiller as the boat approached the dark, shadowy arch of the Marshfield Turnpike Bridge.

"Well," he muttered through his teeth, "the iron kettle might be fast, but I’d like to see it try to smuggle sixty gallons of malt past an excise officer in three inches of mud."

He raised his voice into a loud, desperate shout that made the pigeons fly out of the stone bridge arch:

"Tom! Keep that horse moving! We’ve got four miles to go before the law catches up with us!"