The man arrived at eight in the morning on Friday, before Thomas Marsh had even finished his first cup of tea. Rowan, who never slept properly when the wheel was still, had been awake since dawn, watching the intake from the rafter with a patient, focused attention.
He had heard the man's car on the gravel lane—the wrong kind of engine sound for a delivery or a neighbour—and had shifted to the high north rafter for a better view of the mill yard.
The man was perhaps fifty, heavyset, with the expensive, slightly too-clean coat of someone who didn't spend much time in working countryside. He introduced himself to Thomas Marsh at the door as Mr Gerald Hewitt, representing a development consultancy called Timber Alliance Partners.
'We've written to you twice this year,' Hewitt said, in a voice that managed to sound simultaneously friendly and unapologetic. 'The old mill site has considerable development potential—three acres of riverside land and a stone building in the National Register.
We're prepared to make a substantial offer.' 'I'm not interested in selling,' Thomas said.
'Of course. But I understand you've had a mechanical difficulty this week.'
Hewitt glanced at the still waterwheel with what was not quite a smile. 'Grain delivery missed, wheel inoperative.
That kind of thing can accumulate into a financial pressure, especially for a heritage site with expensive maintenance obligations.' Thomas looked at him the way he looked at things he didn't trust—steadily, without any of the emotion that might be useful to someone on the other side of a negotiation.
'The wheel will be running by this evening,' he said. 'The solicitor opens at nine.'
'Of course,' Hewitt said again. 'But if for any reason it doesn't—our offer is open.
Timber Alliance has considerable experience managing transitions for heritage operators.' He left a business card on the gate post and walked back to his car without looking at the wheel again.
Thomas carried the business card into the mill and set it on the floor. Then he stepped on it once, deliberately, and walked to the telephone to ring the solicitor's office.
Eleven minutes later, his expression had changed. He came back into the mill and sat down on the grain sack bench with his hands on his knees and said nothing for a long time.
Eli appeared from the granary steps. 'What did they say?'
'Mr. Perkins is in hospital.
Appendix. His deputy can't find the secondary key file without the main office key, which Perkins has with him.'
Thomas was quiet again. 'They can try to reach a locksmith in Shrewsbury for an emergency duplicate.
But without the original for measurement, he says it might be Monday before we have anything usable.' In the rafter, Rowan's ears were pressed flat.
Monday. The delivery was Saturday at seven.
If the mill missed the delivery, the autumn contract with the valley cooperative would be in breach. He had heard Thomas explain this to Eli three weeks ago, in the comfortable certainty that nothing would go wrong: breach of contract meant penalty costs; penalty costs on a heritage mill with no insurance subsidy meant the kind of financial difficulty that a man like Hewitt could step directly into.
It was not the first time someone had come to make an offer on the mill. Rowan had overheard two previous conversations in three winters, both ending in the same definitive refusal.
Hewitt was different from the previous visitors in one important way: he knew about the wheel. The specific knowledge of the timing relative to the delivery contract suggested that Hewitt had sources in the valley—someone had told him.
Information about a missed delivery would travel quickly in a small valley with one shared mill. This fact sat in Rowan's mind alongside the practical problem of the key with a heaviness that was distinct from the mechanical challenge.
The mechanical challenge had a solution. He was fairly certain of that.
The other thing required the key to be retrieved first before anything else could happen. Rowan looked at the sluice intake.
Then he looked at the crack in the intake cover through which, three winters ago, he had climbed down to retrieve a lost hazelnut from the floor of the intake channel. He was a dormouse.
He weighed thirty-one grams. His whiskers could sense air currents through gaps smaller than his own body.
And somewhere in the cold dark below the mill floor, a brass operating key—three inches long, with a distinctive hexagonal head—was lying on the stone base of the intake channel under two feet of moving water. Rowan stretched his forepaws along the rafter, flexed his claws once into the worn oak grain of the beam, and began making his way toward the intake cover.