While they judged it, the town went about its business around them. Children ran past with hoops. A wagon loaded with hay creaked toward the livery. Twice, Soren saw men he knew stop at the print shop window and read Fallon's paper, and he saw their faces change, the way faces change when a fear is given a name. He did not go over to them. He kept planing. Maren kept watching the rails with her gray eyes, and once, when a boy ran too close to the sawhorses, she put her good hand out, gentle as a fence, and said, "Careful, now. Sharp things and running do not mix." The boy grinned and slowed.
By evening the ladder was judged and true. It stood in the square, new and pale, smelling of fresh pine, and Soren ran his hand along a rail, proud of it. Maren stood beside him, her bound wrist against her ribs, and she looked at the ladder for a long time.
"It is a good ladder," she said.
"It is," Soren said. "It will hold."
She nodded, and then she said, very quietly, "I am glad it was you below me, Mr. Krogh. Not because you caught me, though I am glad of that too. Because you knew the ladder was rotten, and you stayed anyway, and you held it as steady as you could. That is a kind of honesty I do not meet often."
Soren did not know what to say to that. He was a carpenter, and carpenters are not trained in speeches. He said, "Thank you," and then, because he could not leave it there, he said, "Tomorrow we set it in the tower. And then we go back to the clock."
"Tomorrow," she agreed.
That night, Soren sat at his kitchen table with his book open, and he wrote, in Danish, because his hand still thought in Danish when the day had been long: *I dag viste jeg hende stigen.* Today I showed her the ladder. And under it, because he wrote down what he saw as well as what he did, he added: *Hun stoler paa mine haender.* She trusts my hands. He closed the book and sat for a while in the quiet, listening to the creek, thinking about the clock upstairs in the tower, silent for a month, and about the woman who had come to wake it and could not wake it alone. She needed his hands. He needed her knowledge. It was, he thought, the fairest bargain he had ever made. And then he thought about the petition at the store, and about Fallon's smile, and about the fact that a ladder, however true, would not be enough. The clock would have to speak for itself, one gear at a time, with her knowledge and his hands, and no one else's permission.
The next morning they set the ladder in the tower. It fit the stairwell as if the tower had been waiting for it. Soren climbed it first, slowly, testing each rung with his full weight, and then he came down and nodded, and Maren climbed it with her good hand on the rail and her bound wrist held close, and she did not hurry, and she did not look down, and when she reached the clock room she turned and looked at him, and she smiled, a real smile this time, not the polite one she gave strangers.
"There," she said. "Now we can work."
And so they went back to the clock. Maren had him lift the movement out, piece by piece, and lay it on a cloth on the tower-room table, and she named each part as he set it down: the going train, the escapement, the pendulum leader, the crutch. Soren repeated the names under his breath, the way he had once repeated Danish prayers as a boy, not because he understood them yet but because saying them made them his. The dirt came off with brushes and rags, and the brass began to shine again, dull gold in the lamplight, and Maren's new suspension spring, taken from her father's case, lay in its paper wrapping like a promise. She would not let him fit it yet. "Not until the movement is clean," she said. "A new spring in a dirty clock is like a new roof on a rotten house. It will fail, and you will blame the spring."