Chapter 28 The Railway Bill

The bill was deposited in Parliament at the end of April, and with it came the company's petition for powers that went far beyond the simple right to build a line. Reading the clauses in Blackwell's chambers, Leo saw that the railway proposed to divert the parish road, to take the village common outright, and to empower the company's officers to enter any property within fifty yards of the line without notice. It was, in effect, a licence to rule the valley. Leo studied the bill with the care he had once given to the entail, and the more he read, the darker his mood became. But it was Arthur who saw what his father had missed, and he brought it to him one evening, his finger marking a single clause near the end of the document. "Here," Arthur said. "They have drawn the boundary of the common so that it takes in the schoolhouse grounds. If this bill passes as it stands, Father, Marie's schoolroom is gone, and the question of what a girl may learn will be settled by an Act of Parliament instead of by us." Leo read the clause, and then he read it again. "You have a sharp eye, Arthur. Sharper than mine." "I had a sharp teacher," Arthur said, and the simplicity of it moved Leo more than he cared to show. Marie herself travelled the lanes of the valley that spring, a ledger under her arm, gathering names for the petition against the bill. She called at every cottage within three miles of the proposed line, sat at kitchen tables, drank tea she did not want, and wrote down the words of farmers who had never in their lives been asked for an opinion on anything. By the end of June the petition carried two hundred and eleven names, and the ink of the last signature was scarcely dry before Eleanor Whitmore had arranged to have it carried to London by the night coach. The company's agent, meanwhile, had not been idle. At the end of May, Protheroe arrived at the manor with an offer that he delivered with the air of a man presenting a gift. The company would withdraw its claim to the common and to the schoolhouse grounds, if the Earl of Pemberton would withdraw his opposition to the bill, allow the line to proceed upon its present course, and accept a seat upon the board of the Midland and Western Railway, with a fee of five hundred pounds a year for his counsel. Leo listened to the offer in silence. Then he stood, and Protheroe, who had seen the same movement end a dozen interviews, rose with him. "My answer," Leo said, "is no. You may tell your directors that I am not a man to be bought for five hundred pounds a year, and that if they wish to know why, they may ask the last man who tried to buy me." The village had its own way of answering the railway. A committee was formed at the schoolhouse, and at its head, to the surprise of no one who knew her, was Marie Pemberton. With her worked the doctor's daughter, Miss Eleanor Whitmore, a young woman of two-and-twenty whose father had attended the deathbed of the seventh earl, and who had grown up, as she put it, in the middle of the whole history of the valley. Arthur met Eleanor for the first time at the parish assembly, where the railway was debated with more heat than law. He had come prepared to argue the merits of the rerouted line; she had come prepared to argue that the village should not need to beg for a route that any reasonable engineer would have chosen in the first place. "The line does not have to pass the common at all," she told him, with a directness that took him aback. "It could run two miles east, across the poor land. But the company will not do that, because the poor land is cheap and the common is free. They are not building a railway, Mr. Pemberton. They are taking a village." "The railway is the future," Arthur said, repeating his father's words back to him with more confidence than he felt. "The future can be built without stealing the present," Eleanor answered. "My father's patients cannot eat the future. The geese upon the common cannot eat the future. When the engines throw their sparks, as they will, and a burning cinder lands upon a labourer's thatch, will the directors of the Midland and Western pay to re-roof it?" Arthur had no answer, and he said so. It was the first time in his life, he reflected afterwards, that a woman had argued him into silence—and the first time that silence had felt like a victory rather than a defeat. The weeks that followed were the hardest of Arthur's young life. He studied the law with Blackwell every evening, going over the evidence, rehearsing the testimony, learning the names and characters of the committee members who would judge the case. It was an apprenticeship in everything his father had learned under Thomas Hartley, and Leo, pausing at the door of the study each night, saw in the bent head and the moving pen the same fierce concentration he remembered in a young man reading case law by candlelight above a Hertfordshire yard. It was also a lesson in control, and it was nearly a lesson in failure. At a public meeting in the village, Protheroe rose to defend the company's plans, and Arthur, stung by a jibe about his father's origins, started forward with his fists clenched. Leo caught his arm in a grip of iron and held him until the moment passed. "The crowd is the ring," Leo said to him afterwards, in the privacy of the lane. "The agents of the company are the noise. If you let the noise move you, you have lost your balance before the trick has even begun. You will have your moment to answer him, Arthur—in the committee room, where it counts. Do not waste it on the roadside." Arthur took the lesson, though it cost him his pride to do so. But it was not the meeting that nearly broke him. It was the news, delivered by Blackwell on the last evening of June, that the tenant farmer who had promised to testify about the bribes had disappeared—his cottage empty, his cattle sold, his name scratched from the parish records. "Protheroe has bought him or frightened him," Blackwell said. "Either way, he will not speak. And without his testimony, the charge of bribery rests upon letters and hearsay." Arthur stood at the window of the study, looking out at the darkening fields, and for the first time since the campaign began he felt the true weight of the thing he had taken upon himself. Somewhere in the valley a man who had sworn to tell the truth was running from it, and there was nothing Arthur could do to bring him back—nothing but to find another way, before the committee sat, to make the truth impossible to hide. ---