“Of course.”

She thought he seemed uncharacteristically nervous. Whatever he had to say to her must be important to him, she guessed. Everyone had important things to say to the ealdorman’s wife, but Edgar was special, and Ragna was intrigued.

They rode to the riverside, then followed the cart track that led to the quarry. On one side were the backs of village houses, each with its small plot of land containing a vegetable garden, some fruit trees, one or two animal shelters, and a dunghill. On the other side was the East Field, partly ploughed, the damp clay furrows gleaming, though no work was being done as it was a holiday.

Edgar said: “Notice that the gap between the East Field and the village gardens is wide.”

“Much wider than necessary, enough for two roads.”

“Exactly. Now, it takes most of a day for two men to bring a boatload of stone from the quarry along this track to the river. That makes our stone more expensive. If they use a cart it’s easier, but it takes about the same length of time.”

She guessed he was making an important point, but she did not yet see it. “Is this what you want to show me?”

“When I tried to sell stone to the monastery at Combe, they told me they have started to buy it from Caen, in Normandy, because that’s cheaper.”

She was interested. “How can that be?”

“It travels all the way on one ship, down the Orne River to the sea, and across the Channel to Combe harbor.”

“And our problem is that our quarry isn’t on a river.”

“Not quite.”

“What does that mean?”

“The river is only half a mile away.”

“But we can’t make that half mile disappear.”

“I think we can.”

She smiled. She could see that he was enjoying this gradual revelation. “How?”

“Dig our own channel.”

That surprised her. “What?”

“They’ve done it at Glastonbury,” he said with the air of one who produces a winning card. “Aldred told me.”

“Dig our own river?”

“I’ve worked it out. Ten men with picks and shovels would take about twenty days to dig a channel three feet deep and a bit wider than my raft, from the river to the quarry.”

“Is that all?”

“The digging is the easy part. We might need to reinforce the banks, depending on the consistency of the soil as we dig down, but I can do that myself. More difficult is getting the depth right. Obviously it has to go down far enough to make sure water flows in from the river. But I think I can work that out.”

He was smarter than Wilf and perhaps even than Aldred, she thought, but all she said was: “What would it cost?”

“Assuming we don’t use slaves—”

“I’d rather not.”

“Then a halfpenny a day for each man plus a penny a day for a ganger, so one hundred and twenty pennies, which is half a pound of silver; and we’d have to feed them, as most of them would be away from home.”