The rain came sideways.

  Gerald stood in the front hall with his arms through his coat sleeves and his boots still unlaced, watching through the glass panels beside the door. The water fell in thick, angled lines that blurred the workshop and the stables into grey shapes. The packed dirt of the yard was already dark, and in the low places where Gerald crossed on his way to the chickens, the water had begun to collect in flat brown pools that widened as he watched.

  Da came down the corridor in the heavy oilskin he wore on inspection days. It smelled of lanolin and old rain and hung to his knees. He was pulling on gloves. He stopped at the hall and looked at Gerald with the brief, measuring look he gave to things that needed deciding.

  "River's up," he said. "Find Pim. Check the waterwheel bearings and both lower bridges. If there is debris against the pilings, clear what you can and come back."

  He said this the way he would have said it to any of the workers -- flat, complete, with the assumption that the words were enough. Then he went through the kitchen toward the back of the house, and the rear door opened and the rain got louder for a moment before it shut again.

  Gerald laced his boots. They were the heavy pair Wynn had set out that morning beside the kitchen door, the ones with thick soles that came halfway up his calves. He had not worn them before. They were too large -- his feet shifted inside when he stood -- but the leather was stiff and the laces caught.

  He went out.

  The rain hit his face and neck and the gap between his collar and his jaw all at once. He ducked his head and pulled his coat closed at the throat and crossed the yard at a half-run toward the stables. The water was cold. Not the sharp cold of winter -- the flat, soaking cold of spring rain, the kind that did not sting but sat against the skin and stayed.

  Pim was in the stable doorway, already in his oilskin, fitting the clearing hook's long handle into its leather collar on his belt. The hook hung against his leg -- a curved iron head on a hardwood shaft, the kind of tool that looked simple and was. Behind him, Barrel stood in his stall with his head low and his ears turned back, watching the rain with the expression of an animal who had seen this before and did not approve.

  "Waterwheel and bridges," Gerald said.

  Pim looked at him. Not with surprise -- Pim was never surprised -- but with the quick, measuring look of someone calculating what a companion could carry.

  "Stay behind me on the path," he said. "Keep your hands out of your pockets."

  The path to the waterwheel followed the river downstream from the main yard, cutting through the low scrub between the estate's working buildings and the water. In dry weather it was a firm, beaten track that Gerald had walked a dozen times on his way to the woodpile and the branch road to the beach. In this rain it was mud.

  Not garden mud -- dark and loamy, holding the shape of a boot. River-path mud, grey-brown and loose, churned by the rain into a slick that moved underfoot. Gerald's first three steps were careful. His fourth was not careful enough, and his right boot slid sideways and he caught himself with his hand on his knee, wet fabric bunching under his fingers.

  Ahead of him, Pim walked differently.

  Gerald watched it without understanding it at first. Pim's boots hit the same mud, on the same path, but his weight landed somewhere else -- not on his heels, which slid, but on the balls of his feet, which pressed and held. His stride was shorter than Gerald expected for his height. His shoulders were rounded forward, not hunched but angled, so the rain ran off the oilskin's shoulders and down the back instead of pooling in the collar and running down his chest. His hands were open at his sides. Not balled. Not in his pockets. When the path dipped into a low place where the water ran across the track in a shallow stream, Pim did not step over it. He stepped into it, placing his boot flat and letting the water break around it, and then lifted the other foot clear to the higher ground beyond.

  Gerald tried it at the next puddle. His boot went in too deep -- the water came over the sole and touched his sock, cold and immediate -- but the ground under the water was firmer than the mud beside it.

  Behind them, the estate disappeared into the rain. The Hot House was a dark shape with the faint orange glow of its vents. The main house was a grey rectangle. The greenhouse was invisible, its glass panels the same colour as the sky.

  They reached the waterwheel in what felt like a long time and was probably less than ten minutes.

  The waterwheel sat in its housing where the river narrowed between stone walls that funnelled the current. In the rain, the river was brown -- not the clear green-grey Gerald knew from dry days, but the opaque brown of water carrying soil. It ran fast, the surface wrinkled and broken by small standing waves where the current hit the stone channels. The paddles hit the water with a thick slap rather than the smooth dip Gerald was used to, and the spray from each entry was brown and reached the housing timbers above.

  Pim crouched beside the bearing cap on the near side, where the wheel's axle came through the housing wall. He put his hand on the cap and left it there.

  After a long moment, he moved his hand to the wood of the housing frame, an inch above the bearing.

  "Come here," he said.

  Gerald crouched beside him. The rain ran off Pim's oilskin and onto Gerald's shoulder, and Gerald shifted sideways.

  "Hand on the cap."

  Gerald put his hand on the bearing cap. It was iron, and cold, and wet, and through the iron he could feel the axle turning -- a steady vibration that ran up through his palm and into the small bones of his wrist.

  "Now the wood."

  He moved his hand to the housing frame. The wood was wet and rough, and the vibration was different -- softer, broader, a hum that he felt in the flat of his hand rather than the heel.

  "The cap rattles when the bearing's worn," Pim said. "This one's smooth. Feel the difference?"

  Gerald put his hand back on the cap and then on the wood again. He did not feel the difference. He felt two kinds of vibration and did not know what either meant. But the second time he touched the cap, he thought -- he was not sure -- he felt what Pim meant by smooth. A turning that had nothing extra in it.

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  Pim checked the other bearing. He opened the grease port with a wrench from his belt and squinted into it. He worked the sluice gate open and closed twice. Gerald followed him to the tailrace, where the water exited the housing and rejoined the river below. It was running full and fast, the water pushing through the stone channel in a flat brown sheet that curled where it met the air.

  Pim pointed upstream. "See the colour?"

  Gerald looked. Brown.

  "Darker than an hour ago. That's upstream runoff -- the hills are draining." He wiped rain from his jaw with the back of his wrist. "The wheel can take it. Built for spring floods. But if it goes darker than that, like tea, that's bank erosion. That's when the debris starts."

  Gerald looked at the brown water and tried to imagine it darker. He could not, but he kept the word -- tea -- beside the feeling of the cap in his palm and the way Pim's weight sat on the balls of his feet and the step into the puddle rather than around it.

  The wider bridge near the branch road looked solid. Pim leaned over the railing and checked the pilings at the waterline, and Gerald leaned beside him and saw the stone pilings standing in the brown current with nothing caught against them.

  The narrow footbridge was different.

  Gerald saw it from thirty paces upstream: a dark mass against the bridge's near-side piling, sitting in the water at an angle. As they got closer, it resolved into a tangle of branches and sections of old wattle fencing -- the woven-stick panels that farmers used upstream to pen livestock and line ditches. The river had torn them loose and pushed them against the piling in a compressed mass wider than Gerald's armspan. The water behind it had begun to pool, rising on the upstream side while the downstream side ran faster and lower.

  Pim stopped on the bank.

  "Not good," he said, which Gerald had already worked out.

  The rain was heavier now. Gerald could feel it drumming on his shoulders through the coat. His trousers were wet to the thigh. His hands were red. The cold that had been sitting on his skin had worked deeper, into the muscles of his forearms and the joints of his fingers, and standing still made it worse.

  Pim unslung the clearing hook from his belt and stepped down the bank to the water's edge. The current ran fast here, pushing against the debris, and the branches caught in the mass shuddered with each pulse of the water. Pim braced his feet on the wet stone of the bank and extended the hook toward the tangle, testing its hold on the outermost branches.

  Gerald saw the rope.

  A length of heavy hemp was tied to the bridge's near-side railing post, coiled on the deck, its working end trailing toward the downstream side. Gerald watched Pim set the hook and pull and watched the current push the debris back against the piling the moment Pim released. The hook dislodged. The river replaced.

  Pim needed two hands on the hook. The rope needed a hand on the bridge.

  Gerald's feet moved. He crossed the narrow bridge in four steps, the planks slick under his boots, the railing wet under his left hand, and he reached the trailing rope end and picked it up.

  The rope was heavy with rain. He looped it once around the railing post -- over the top, around, and back through, the way he had seen Tom loop the horse lead around the stable post -- and pulled the tail tight. The loop caught. He braced his feet on the planks and took up the slack, the rough hemp pulling against his palms, and looked down at Pim on the bank below.

  Pim saw him. His face did not change. He shifted his weight, set the hook deeper into the tangle, and pulled.

  The mass came apart in stages. The outer branches tore free first, and the current caught them and swung them downstream, and the rope went taut in Gerald's hands as the freed debris pressed against the line. He leaned back. The pull was stronger than he expected -- not a jerk but a steady, heavy drag, the weight of wet wood and moving water combined, and it pulled at his shoulders and the backs of his legs and the small muscles around his spine. He held it. The debris swung on the rope's arc and hung there, trailing in the current, and Pim reset the hook and pulled again.

  Three pulls. The first took the branches. The second pulled the wattle panels free in a flat, dripping sheet that folded against the current. The third cleared the piling, and Gerald felt the rope go slack as the last of it turned in the current and drifted downstream toward the cliff edge.

  Gerald's hands hurt. The hemp had pressed grooves into his palms, deep enough that he could feel them when he opened his fingers. His forearms trembled -- a fine, shallow tremor from holding a weight longer than the muscles wanted to hold it. The rain ran down his face and he stood on the bridge with the slack rope in his hands and watched the last of the branches go over the cliff edge.

  Something had happened while he held the rope. He had not noticed it while it was happening, but he noticed it now because it was ending: the cold had been further away. Not gone. Not warm. Further. As though the rope and the pull and the water breaking against the pilings had pushed the cold somewhere behind him, to a place where it was still there but not the thing he was doing.

  Now the rope was slack and the cold was coming back, and the distance was closing.

  Pim climbed the bank and stepped onto the bridge. He looked at the piling -- clear now, the brown water running past it. He looked at Gerald. He reached over and took the rope, unwound it from the post, and coiled it on the deck in a flat spiral.

  "Bridge is clear," he said.

  That was all he said about it.

  The walk back was long.

  The rain had settled into something heavier and more permanent, the kind that had stopped being weather and become a condition. Gerald walked behind Pim and kept his weight on the balls of his feet and his hands open at his sides and stepped into the puddles rather than around them. His boots had surrendered during the bridge work and his socks were heavy and cold against his feet. The muscles in his legs ached from the mud and the bracing.

  But he remembered the distance.

  Not as a thought. As the memory of where the cold had been while he was holding the rope, and where it was now that his hands were empty.

  They came through the gate into the yard and crossed to the kitchen door, and Pim pushed it open and the warmth from the kitchen fire hit Gerald's face. Mary was at the stove. She looked at them once. She moved the kettle to the hot plate.

  Wynn came through from the hall. She took in the two of them -- dripping on the flagstones, Pim's oilskin running water in streams, Gerald's coat dark and heavy, both of them muddy to the waist.

  "Change," she said. "Both of you. Before you sit."

  Pim went toward the servant's quarters. Gerald went upstairs.

  His room was dry and still.

  Gerald pulled off his coat. It was heavier than it should have been, the wool saturated, and it left a cold patch on his shoulders when it came free. He hung it on the peg inside his door -- the same peg where his shirts hung, where the pressed birthday shirt had hung a week ago. The coat dripped. A thin line of water ran from the hem to the floor and pooled in the gap between two boards.

  He pulled off his boots and his socks and his wet trousers and his shirt and stood in his underclothes, and the air was cold against his wet skin, and he brought his hands up and looked at them.

  They were red. Not burned-red, not the red of Edric's wrist against the marver. Rain-red. Cold-red. The knuckles were stiff. The grooves from the rope were still there, pressed into the heels of his palms in two lines that were paler than the red around them. He opened and closed his hands, and the fingers moved slowly, and the joints ached.

  Two nights ago he had picked up a punty rod with these hands, in the workshop dark. That weight had been still and smooth and borrowed. The rope had been rough, and wet, and had pulled back.

  Gerald put on dry clothes. The dry fabric against his skin was so warm it was almost a new kind of cold -- the shock of absence, which turned out to be its own kind of heat. He pulled on a clean shirt and dry trousers and wool socks and stood by the window.

  The rain fell. The yard was brown puddles and dark mud. The workshop was a grey shape in it. Beyond the workshop the river ran high and brown. Somewhere downstream, the bridge piling stood clear in the current because he had been standing on the bridge when Pim needed someone standing on the bridge.

  He looked at his hands again. The redness was already fading as the room's warmth reached his fingers. The rope grooves were still there. They would be gone by morning. The skin would smooth and close and his hands would look the way they always looked -- small, eight years old, unremarkable.

  Gerald went downstairs to see if Mary had left anything warm on the stove.