He had known this was coming. He had known it for seven years. It still made his stomach turn over every time, the way the dark came up for him earlier than for other men and thicker, the way the edges went first and then the middle, until he was left with a kind of luminous fog in which shapes swam and dissolved. In daylight, if he looked a little to one side of a thing, he could see it well enough to fool anyone. In dusk he could fool nobody who was watching.
She was watching. He could feel it.
"There's a bad place by the next drove," she said, in an ordinary voice. "Where the bank slipped last winter. The road narrows. I'll keep to the dyke side."
"Thank you," said Ivo, after a moment.
That was all. She did not ask anything. She drove on with the reins gathered short and her eyes on the road, and when they came to the bad place he felt the gig tilt and slow and right itself, and then they were past.
Then, ahead in the darkness, he saw a red glow, and heard the engine.
He heard it before he could see anything but that glow: a deep, slow, double beat, like a great heart, that came up through the wheels of the gig and through the seat and into his own chest. Thud—and a long, wet, sighing rush. Thud—and the rush again. As they came nearer the glow resolved into the open door of a boiler house, square and red, and above it a tall brick chimney trailing a banner of sparks into the rain, and beside it a high narrow building with long round-headed windows lit from within, and through the windows, rising and falling with that terrible patience, something enormous and black.
"Oh," said Ivo, very quietly, as another man might have said it in a cathedral.
She drew up in the yard. A dog barked. A door opened, spilling lamplight onto the wet cobbles, and a woman's figure stood in it with a child on her hip.
"Bet," said Rosamund. "Is Jethro inside? I must speak to him."
The woman did not move from the door. "He's at the engine, Your Grace," she said, and the title came out of her stiff and strange. "He's been at the engine since noon. The river's up and the wheel's taking water faster than he can lift it. He said—" She stopped. Her face crumpled. "He said if you came, Your Grace, he wasn't fit to look at you."