"Then he'll have to look at me unfit," said Rosamund, and got down from the gig.
VIII.
The engine house was hot as an oven and loud as a battle.
The great beam filled the upper half of the building, a single cast-iron bar thirty feet long, pivoted at its middle on a wall of brick as thick as a castle's, rocking slow and enormous over their heads with a groan at each end of its stroke. At one end the piston rod drove down into the cylinder in a hiss of steam; at the other the connecting rod swung down through the floor to the crank and the great flywheel, and beyond the far wall, in its own housing, the scoop wheel turned—forty feet across, Rosamund shouted in his ear, with paddles of oak as long as a man—lifting the black water of the fen drain and flinging it up and over into the river. The whole building shook to it. The air stank of hot iron and coal smoke and the green mud of the drain.
Jethro Scarth was at the foot of the cylinder with an oil can, and when he saw her he set it down very slowly on the floor plates and stood with his great hands hanging.
She went straight up to him. She did not say anything about the paper. She said, loud enough to carry over the engine, "How high is she?"
He stared at her. Then something in his shoulders let go. "Fourteen foot on the river gauge, ma'am. Your Grace. And rising. She's never been above thirteen since the engine was put in. I've had the wheel down to her lowest dip since noon and she'll barely lift. There's too much head." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and left a black streak across it. "And there's water coming through the Barrier Bank below the wheel house. I saw it at dusk. A boil. Coming up through the field like a spring, and it's coloured."
"Coloured," said Ivo sharply.
Jethro looked at him for the first time.
"Brown," he said. "Brown water, sir. Not clear."
Ivo had seen brown water come up through the earth before. He had seen it outside Badajoz, where the French had dammed the Rivillas to flood the ditch, and the dam had begun to pipe. Clear water seeping through a bank was a nuisance. Brown water meant the bank was carrying its own body away with it, grain by grain, from the inside.