Chapter 29 The Committee

The committee sat in a low-ceilinged room in Westminster, where the light fell thin and grey through tall windows and the air was heavy with the smell of dust and old paper. The chairman was Lord Tarrant, a blunt Yorkshire peer with a farmer's hands and a peer's impatience with fools, and he opened the proceedings by inviting the promoters to state their case. The company's counsel was Mr. Marbury, a barrister of formidable reputation, silver-haired and silver-tongued, who spoke for the railway with the assurance of a man who had never lost a bill in committee and did not intend to begin now. He set out the case for the line with fluency and force—the markets it would open, the coal it would carry, the prosperity it would bring to a backward corner of the kingdom—and when he sat down, the members of the committee nodded among themselves as though the matter were already settled. Then he came to the opposition, and his tone changed. "The Earl of Pemberton," Marbury said, "is a man of undoubted goodwill. But he is also a man of peculiar history, whose knowledge of England was acquired, by his own account, at the sawdust edge of a travelling circus. We are asked to believe that such a man is better placed than the engineers of this company to judge where the nation's railways should run. My lords, I put it to you that sentimentality is a poor substitute for engineering, and that the interests of three hundred tenant farmers—however affectionately regarded—must yield to the interests of the kingdom." There was a murmur of agreement. Leo, seated in the body of the room with Catherine's hand resting upon his arm, did not move. He had been called worse than a juggler and a mountebank in his time, and he had learned that the best answer to contempt was to outlive it. Blackwell rose to answer. He was young, and his voice shook a little at the first sentence, but he steadied himself, and Leo heard in his measured tones the cadence of the master who had trained him. "My lords," Blackwell said, "I will not detain you with my client's history, except to say this: the gentlemen who manage the Pemberton estates have been petitioned against by every engineer who has ever drawn a line through their land, and they have yet to be wrong about the water that floods their meadows or the roads that carry their harvests. The Earl of Pemberton does not ask this committee to halt the railway. He asks only that the railway be built where it will do the least harm—and that the men who built it be prevented from stealing a village under cover of a surveyor's licence." He then laid out the case against the present route: the flooding of the water meadows, the loss of the common, the destruction of the schoolhouse grounds. And he saved the worst for last. Drawing a sheaf of letters from his case, he read them one by one—letters from Mr. Protheroe to the straw man who had been buying up the smallholdings, letters that named sums and dates and the names of tenant farmers, letters that could not be explained away. Marbury objected. The chairman overruled him. And then Arthur was called to the stand. He testified for two hours, and Leo, watching from his seat, felt the pride swell in his chest until he thought it would choke him. Arthur answered every question with a calm that was remarkable in a young man of twenty-one. He described the ground he had walked, the sluices he had studied, the families he had visited. He explained the workings of the valley—its floods, its soil, its ancient lanes—with a fluency that made the company's surveyors look like men who had read their maps upside down. And he produced, at the last, the testimony that broke the case. It was not the vanished farmer who spoke. It was the clerk from the inn, a thin, frightened man who had been offered immunity for his part in the business, and who now stood before the committee with his hat crushed in his hands and told them everything—the meetings in the private parlour, the bags of silver, the threats that had followed when a man hesitated. The room was silent when he finished. Lord Tarrant looked at Mr. Protheroe, who had gone the colour of tallow, and then he looked at the members of the committee, and he did not need to say a word. Eleanor Whitmore spoke that afternoon, in a voice that carried to the furthest bench of the committee room. She spoke of the common, of the geese and the children and the washing lines, of the schoolhouse where her friend Marie Pemberton taught the girls of the estate to read. "The company tells us that the railway is the future," she said. "Perhaps it is. But a future that is purchased with the homes of the poor is a future the poor will not be asked to enjoy. We ask only that the line be moved—not stopped, not defeated, only moved—so that the village and the railway may both live." The committee delivered its verdict on the third day. The bill would pass, but with amendments: the line was to be rerouted around the village and the schoolhouse, through the poorer land to the east; compensation was to be assessed at full value, with a separate sum for every family displaced; and the company was to endow the school with a room for the girls of the parish, in recognition of the services of Miss Marie Pemberton to the education of the district. Leo sat very still while the clerk read out the terms, and he thought of Thomas Hartley, who had taught him that a case was won not in the flourish of a closing speech but in the patient gathering of truth, a fact at a time. The young man in the wig standing before the committee had learned that lesson, and it had served him as it had once served Leo himself. Leo heard the words and felt the tension drain from his shoulders like water. He turned to Arthur, who was standing very straight, his face betraying nothing, and he saw that the boy's hands were trembling. "You did it, Arthur," Leo said quietly. "We did it," Arthur answered. "All of us." That evening, in the garden of Ashworth Manor, with the sunset reddening the sky above the elms, Arthur asked leave to court Miss Eleanor Whitmore, and his father, who had watched the two of them through a long summer of argument and admiration, gave his consent without a moment's hesitation. "Your mother will be pleased," Leo said. "And so am I. She is a woman who knows what she believes, Arthur, and she will not be turned from it. That is a rare thing, and a precious one. Hold to her, and you will never need to hold to anything else." ---