Chapter 5 The Mill That Did Not Turn

Marden Mill sat on the north bank where the Awn bends, and it had been keeping the river company for eleven years without taking a delivery. Nyle walked out to it at four in the afternoon with the twenty-third Return folded inside his coat. The wheel house door stood open. The wheel itself was a low breastshot thing, twenty-two feet across, and it had been built in a century when men still cut their own gear. It stood in a pit that had been pumped dry sometime in the last decade and had since taken a foot of black water. The lower half of every blade was under. The cockshaft, where the oil went, had been given two coats of blacklead at some point, and beneath the blacklead the iron was flaked through in patches the size of a thumbnail. Nobody had turned it. Nobody could have turned it. The millrace above the headrace was silted to a hand's depth, and the gate had been chained at the top, and the chain had a padlock on it that had rusted shut. Inside the mill floor there were four pairs of stones still standing under their tackles, and the miller's dust had been swept into the corner by the door, which is what happens when a building is kept in use as a store. "Who told you I hadn't run it?" Raff Teasdale was sitting on the tailrace wall with a pair of hands too large for his body. He had been the last miller of Marden and had spent the eleven years since as a storekeeper, which meant the mill and the store occupied the same trust and he had therefore been the only man who could answer Nyle's question without asking anyone's permission. "The tailrace," Nyle said. "And the fact that you did not ask me who I was." "It's cold for standing about being introduced." Teasdale got up. His band had been cut down to two rows and the second row was thin. "You want to know about the gear. Everyone who comes up here wants to know about the gear." "Who came before me?" "Nobody with a docket." He pushed the mill door open the rest of the way. "A man in a good coat, eighteen years back, wanting to know if the gear was sound so he could sign for it. I told him the gear was in the pit and the pit had water in it and that was the end of the conversation. He wrote something down. I saw him do it." "Eighteen years back. What year?" "The year of the water." Nyle took out the Return and found the line. The civic debit schedule of the twenty-third year carried a works item: *Marden Mill, gear renewal, sluice cleared, headrace re-cut; one hundred and eighty hours.* One hundred and eighty hours, at a labour rate that put it at roughly two men working the better part of a winter. He looked at the millrace. He looked at the wheel. He looked at the copper on the sluice, which was bright in a way that water does not leave. "This was done," he said. "No." "It was done and it was not done." "Mister." Teasdale took the Return out of his hands, which he did with the casual authority of a man who has been getting documents away from inspectors since before this one had a band. "If it had been done I would have turned it. There is no pleasure in the assertion. There are no hours in a mill that does not run. That is the entire trade." He handed the paper back. "Who had the work?" "The Hourhouse had the work. A clerk of the Hourhouse brought the money out in a handcart and I could have used it to pay a man to clear the headrace for a fortnight." Teasdale's voice did not change, which cost him something. "He did not offer. He asked whether the gear was sound, and I told him the gear was in the water, and he wrote it down, and he went away. The sluice got cleared the next spring by the flood. Nobody sent a docket." "Do you know the clerk's name?" "He was no sort of man for that office. Twenty-six or thereabouts, and he wrote a beautiful hand, and he would not look in the pit." Nyle kept absolutely still. "Wend Ferrick came to this office eighteen years ago," he said. "He did." "You said he was twenty-six or thereabouts. The Reckoner of this city was twenty-six eighteen years ago, and he asked me about the weather line in the same year." Nyle put the Return away. "That is two coincidences and I am not a man who believes in one." "I am going to say a question," Nyle said. "A clerk came to this office eighteen years ago, asked you to certify a gear that was under two feet of black water, and wrote down what you told him. That clerk has since become the Reckoner of this city. That clerk told me yesterday, with great patience, that the weather line was older than his office." "The weather line is older than all of us," Teasdale said. "That's what it is for." He sat back down on the wall. "You will find the line and you will find the mill and then you will have two things," he said, "and you will still not have the hand that wrote them. Because there is no hand. There is a line that goes on forty years and six clerks and a mill that did not turn, and if you take those to a senior desk they will thank you and put the file in a drawer with the grain scale, and in eleven years another man will come up the bank with a good coat on and ask me about the gear again." Nyle stood in the cold and thought about the shape of it. A deduction with no item behind it. A works item with no work behind it. A ceiling with nine hours standing unused. Three figures that all wanted to be the same nine hours, arranged in a ring so that each one explained the other and none of them explained the river. He made the choice there on the tailrace wall, with the miller's dust going grey on his coat. He would not take Teasdale's name into the file yet. A name is a charge, and a charge made on a miller who has already given him what he gave for free would cost the miller more than it cost the mill. He would write the works item, he would write the state of the gear, and he would leave the clerk's description in the margin as a thing observed and not as a thing alleged. He also wrote down the second thing he had noticed, which was the hour the clerk had come. Teasdale had said the night; he had not asked which night. A man who is asked a question he can answer exactly will answer it exactly, and Teasdale had said *the year of the water* instead, and then *eighteen years back*, and both of those were answers given by a man who does not want a date on a document. Nyle would have to come back for the date. He would have to ask it in the ordinary way, over a cup of something, with the ledger closed on the table, and he wrote that down as well, because a man who forgets how he is going to ask a question will end up asking it the wrong way and then blame the answer. "Raff Teasdale," he said. "If this goes the way I think it is going, I will come back and ask you to sign a statement. I am telling you now so that when I do, you will know I did not spring it on you." "That's a courteous way of telling a man he is going to need it." Teasdale pulled his cuffs over his hands. "Bring it in the spring. The ground's soft then and the pit's easier to look at for anyone who doesn't believe you." ---