A week after the bridge collapsed

A week after the bridge collapsed, Merthin had built a ferry.
Caris admired Merthin’s work. The raft was large enough to carry a horse and cart without taking the beast out of the shafts, and it had a firm wooden railing to keep sheep from failing overboard. New wooden platforms at water level on both banks made it easy for carts to roll on and off. Passengers paid a penny, collected by a monk – the ferry, like the bridge, belonged to the priory.
Most ingenuous was the system Merthin had devised for moving the raft from one bank to the other. A long rope ran from the south end of the raft across the river, around a post, back across the river, around a drum and back to the raft, were it was attached again to the north end. The drum was connected by wooden gears to a wheel turned by a pacing ox. A lever altered the gears so that the drum turned in either direction, depending on where the raft was going or coming back – and there was no need to take the ox out of its traces and turn it around.
‘It’s quite simple,’Merthin said when she marvelled at it – and it was, when she looked closely. The lever simply lifted one large cog wheel up out of the chain and moved into its place two smaller wheels, the effect being to reverse the direction in which the drum turned. All the same, no one in Kingsbridge had seen anything like it.
During the course of the morning, half the town came to look at Merthin’s amazing new machine. Caris was brsting with pride in him. Elfric stood by, explaining the mechanism to anyone who asked, taking the credit for Merthin’s work.
Caris wondered where Elfric got the nerve. He had destroyed Merthin’s door – an act of violence that would have scandalized the town, had it not been overtaken by the greater tragedy of the bridge collapse. He had beaten Merthin with a stick, and Merthin still had the bruise on his face. And he had colluded in a deception intended to make Merthin marry Griselda and raise another’s man child. Merthin had continued to work with him, feeling that the emergency outweighed their quarrel. But Caris did not know how Elfric could continue to hold his head up.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

The two dogs Skip and Scrap

The two dogs Skip and Scrap, greeted one another with joyful enthusiasm. Hey were from the same litter, though they not look similar: Skip was a brown boy dog and Scrap a small black female. Skip was a typical village dog, lean and suspicious, whereas the city-dwelling Scrap was plump and contended.
It was ten years since Gwenda had picked out of a litter of mongrels puppies, on the floor of Cari’s bedroom in the wool merchant’ big house, the day Cari’s mother died. Since then Gwenda and Caris had become close friends. They met only two or three times a year, but they shared their secrets. Gwenda felt she could tell Caris everything and the information would never get back to her parents or anyone else in Wigleigh. She assumed Caris felt the same: because Gwenda did not talk to any other Kingsbridge girls, here could not be risk of letting something slip in a careless moment.
Gwenda arrived in Kingsbridge on the Friday of Fleece Fair week. Her father, Joby, went to the fairground I front of the cathedral to sell the furs of squirrels he had trapped in the forest near Wigleigh. Gwenda went straight to Cari’s house and the two dogs were reunited.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet