was actually happening? – and so they refilled their tankards and glasses, relit their pipes and settled on their stools. Joe put his shaving things away and returned to his chair, where from time to time he discreetly coughed. From his stool by the window, Jonathan kept an eye on the logs in the fire and surveyed the level of the candles. Margot prodded the river-wet clothes into a bucket with an old paddle and gave them a good swirl, then she put the pan of spiced beer back over the stove. The fragrance of nutmeg and allspice mingled with tobacco and burning logs, and the smell of the river receded.
The drinkers began to talk, finding words to turn the night’s events into a story.
‘When I saw him in the doorway there, I was astonished. No, astounded. That’s what I was. Astounded!’
‘I was stunned, I was.’
‘And me. I was stunned and astounded. What about you?’
They were collectors of words, the same way so many of the gravel-diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.
‘I reckon I was dumbfounded.’
They tried it out for flavour, weighing it on their tongues. It was good. They gave their colleague admiring nods.
One was new to the Swan, new to storytelling. He was still finding his feet. ‘How about flabbergasted? Could I say that?’
‘Why not?’ they encouraged. ‘Say flabbergasted, if you like.’
Beszant the boat-mender came back in. A boat could tell a story too and he’d been to see what it had to say. Everybody in the inn looked up to hear.
‘She’s there,’ he reported. ‘All bashed in along the saxboard. Graunched something terrible and taking in water. She were half under. I’ve left her upturned on the bank, but nothing can be done. ’Tis all over for her now.’
‘What do you suppose happened? Was it the wharf that he went into?’
He shook his head with authority. ‘Something came smashing down on the boat. From above.’ He brought one hand down powerfully through the air and crashed one palm against the other to demonstrate. ‘Wharf, no – boat’d be bashed in from the side.’
The drinkers now talked themselves up- and downstream, furlong by furlong, bridge by bridge, setting the damage to man and boat against every danger. All were rivermen of one kind or another – if not by profession then by long association – and every man had his say as they tried to work out what had happened. In their minds they smashed the little boat into every jetty and every wharf, every bridge and every millwheel, upstream and down, but none was right. Then they came to Devil’s Weir.
The weir had great uprights of solid ash at regular intervals across the river, and between them were wide expanses of wood, like walls, that could be raised or lowered according to the flow. It was customary to get out of your boat and drag it up the slope that was made for the purpose, in order to go around the weir and then re-enter the water on the other side. There was an inn on the bank, so most of the time you could count on finding someone to give you a hand in exchange for the price of a drink. But sometimes – when the boards were up and the boat was nimble, when the river was calm and the boatman very experienced – then a man might save himself a bit of time and steer through. He would have to align his boat carefully, not take it askew, then he would need to pull in his blades so as not to break them against the great uprights, and – if the river was high – he would need to duck or else throw himself flat on his back in the boat to avoid knocking his head on the weir-beam.
They measured all this against the man. They measured it against the boat.
‘So is that it?’ asked Joe. ‘It was at Devil’s Weir he came to grief?’
Beszant picked up a fragment of wood, matchstick-sized, from a little pile. Black and firm, it was the largest of the splinters Rita had extracted from the forehead of the injured man. He tested it against his fingertip, felt the residual firmness of the wood despite the long contact with water. Most likely ash, and the weir was built of ash.
‘I reckon so.’
‘I’ve taken Devil’s Weir myself more than once,’ a farmhand said. ‘You too, I reckon?’