The south choir wall is a ribcage of flyers.

You walk a narrow plank between inner wall and outer pier. Wind. The graveyard north is a different country: quieter, finished. Here everything is decision.

A flying buttress is an arch in the air with a job. The vault will press out as well as down. If that outward shove stays in the wall, the wall grows thick and windows shrink, like the old nave. If you catch the shove with a flyer and drop it down a heavy pier into the ground, the wall can be a frame for glass.

Iseult’s loft, tucked against the cloister, throws a colored chip of blue onto the mud, a spilled saint.

One joint on the middle flyer is dark-wet. Yesterday’s mortar has not taken. Clouds over the River Wold are the color of bad pewter.

Maud’s rule, posted in your head: mortar hates rain. Rain loves to make soup of your work and charge you for the pleasure.

Outer piers of the flyers are thick on purpose, like boots. The flying arch between wall and boot is the part people point at. The ground under the boot is the part that matters. A wet joint at the spring of that flyer is a mouth that will spit water into Iseult’s glass if you let the rain stir it. You can smell the river. You can smell lime. You can smell the hour deciding.