Turn 2 of 7

Say nothing — set down the rods and walk closer to the bridge.

You set the survey rods down on the exposed cobbles, leaning them against a half-buried wall whose mortar has gone soft and black with decades underwater. The metal clicks against stone and the sound carries further than it should across the still air. You wipe your palms on your trousers and start walking toward the bridge.

The ground is treacherous underfoot — a layer of slick silt over the old road surface, broken in places where the stone has heaved and cracked after long submersion. You pick your way between the ruts, and as you get closer you can see more of the bridge than you could from the shore. It is a single-arch stone bridge, small, built for carts and foot traffic, and the parapet is intact on one side and sheared away on the other where the water took it. Mussels cling to the underside of the arch in dark clusters. The whole structure weeps a thin film of water, as though it is still sweating from its long submersion.

The woman watches you approach without moving. Up close she is shorter than you expected, and younger than the clothes first suggested — maybe thirty, with a broad, weathered face and hands that are rough with work. Her hair is dark, pulled back under a cap that has gone translucent with wet. There is a cut on her knuckle, fresh, beading with real blood. She has been wringing her sleeve because she fell in, or was in the water, and the cold does not seem to touch her the way it should. Her shawl is heavy and dripping and she holds it close with one hand.

You stop at the near end of the bridge, ten feet from her. The stone beneath your boots is solid enough, but the drop to the reservoir on the broken side is steep and the water is black and still. A smell rises from it — not rot, not algae, but something colder, like wet chalk. She looks at you the way someone looks at a stranger who has wandered onto their road, measuring whether you are a problem or a help.

"You're not from the village," she says. It is not a question. Her eyes move over your jacket, your boots, the clipboard you forgot you were still carrying.

"You've come down from the ridge. Is the survey still going, then? They said they'd be done by Michaelmas." She glances past you, upstream, toward where the valley narrows and the upper mill would have stood.

"I can't think why he's not here. He said the bridge. He was very particular about it."