The first frost of the season came the following Tuesday, laying a white skin across the water meadows and tracing ice crystals along the mill wheel's upper paddles where the spray had settled and frozen in the night. Rowan felt it before dawn as a change in the acoustic quality of the mill—the wheel running fractionally slower in the denser air, the timer beams contracting slightly in the cold and altering the pitch of the spur wheel vibration by perhaps two hertz.
Not a fault. Just the season changing. He noted it and settled deeper into his nest.
Eli came in at seven-thirty instead of eight, because the early frost had made the mill yard stones slippery and Thomas had asked him to salt them before the delivery records needed updating. He salted the yard, then came inside, pulled off his coat, and put the kettle on the small ring in the mill office corner.
Then he came out onto the main mill floor and looked up at the east rafter.
Rowan was there. He usually was at this hour. Eli had not told anyone else about the key incident, on the grounds that no account of a dormouse retrieving a sunken brass key from a flooded intake channel was going to be received by the world at large with anything other than polite disbelief.
He had told his grandfather, who had not disbelieved him but had also not said anything further about it after that one quiet sentence in the yard. His grandmother, had she been alive, would have had an opinion. She had opinions about most things, and a particular fondness for animals she called clever creatures—her term for anything that demonstrated practical intelligence beyond what its size suggested.
Eli put the wooden dish of hazelnuts and dried cherries on the windowsill in the usual place. Rowan came down from the rafter—not all the way to the floor, but to the lower brace timber where the windowsill was at eye level—and took a cherry from the dish with both forepaws.
He ate it in the quick, precise way of a small animal that is not accustomed to eating in company and has decided to make an exception.
Eli sat on the grain sack bench with his tea mug and watched him.
'I've been thinking,' Eli said. 'Grandpa's going to need to drain the intake channel this winter for the annual cleaning.
He usually does it in December, after the wheel's pulled for greasing.' He paused.
'The crack in the intake cover is on the east side, near the wall. I'm going to seal it with lime mortar and weatherboard this week.
So it doesn't get wider over winter.' He looked at the dormouse.
'I'll put a proper access hatch in the cover instead. Hinged, with a lift ring.
So if anything ever falls in again, someone could go down and retrieve it properly. Without having to squeeze through a crack.
Seems like a reasonable improvement to the setup.' The weeks after the frost settled into the quiet rhythm of late autumn at the mill.
The delivery contract was renewed for another year, the terms unchanged. The new gate chain pin arrived from the ironmonger on Tuesday as promised and was fitted by Thomas and Eli together on a dry morning, Thomas holding the chain taut while Eli drove the pin home with a small hammer.
It was a five-minute job. The key tested secure on the new pin with a satisfying solidity that neither of them commented on but that both of them noticed.
The intake cover crack was sealed with hydraulic lime mortar the following week. Eli mixed the mortar himself from a bag in the store and worked it into the crack with a pointing trowel, smoothing it flush with the stone floor.
In the centre of the board he cut a square hatch, framed with oak beading, hinged with a pair of brass butt hinges, and fitted with a flush lift-ring of stainless steel. The hatch sat flush with the floor when closed and opened cleanly when lifted, revealing the stone of the original floor surface and, through it, the access to the intake channel below.
Rowan examined the completed hatch from the lower brace timber one morning while Eli was working in the granary. He pushed the lift ring lightly with one paw.
The hatch swung open smoothly on its hinges and closed again with a clean, solid click. He noted the dimensions of the opening: considerably larger than the old crack.
Rowan finished the cherry. He considered the second one, decided against it, and sat for a moment in the small pool of morning light from the window—the wheel sound deep and constant behind everything, the smell of grain and stone and river all around, the beams warm with conducted sunlight, the whole interior of the mill breathing its old, familiar breath around both of them.
Then he turned and went back up the brace timber to the high east rafter, curled his long tail around himself against the autumn cold, and let the mill's heartbeat carry him back toward sleep. Outside, the Millcreek wheel turned on in the morning frost, as it had turned for two hundred years, as it would turn for many winters more—its paddles rising and falling in the cold, clear water, keeping time with the valley, keeping time with the river, keeping the grain moving and the old stone mill alive in the quiet fold of the autumn hills.