Chapter 32 The Petition

The petition gathered signatures at the village hall, and the hall was so full of people that they had to hold a second meeting in the road outside, and the road outside was so full that the villagers stood on the common and held candles in the dark and listened to Eleanor read the list of names. There were six hundred and forty-three signatures, and Eleanor read them aloud, one by one, and her voice did not shake, and the people who heard her understood that the petition was not merely a document but a declaration — a statement that the village of Ashworth-in-the-Wold existed, that it had been here longer than the railway and would be here after, and that it would not be moved again without a fight. Arthur stood at the edge of the crowd, beside Leo, who had come out of the manor to witness what his son was doing, and he felt a gratitude so fierce it took his breath away. Eleanor had written the petition herself, in a hand so clear and precise it could have been engraved on stone, and she had framed the argument not as opposition to progress but as a demand that progress be mindful of the people it passed through. The railway was not the enemy, she wrote. The enemy was the lie that said there was no choice between the village and the line. The enemy was the man who told you that the public interest meant the interest of the company, and nothing else. "It is a good document," Leo said, and his voice was thick with something Arthur had learned to recognise — pride, mixed with the knowledge that the son was now greater than the father, at least in this matter. "She has your tongue, Arthur. And your father's patience." "She has her own mind," Arthur said. "I am merely the hand that carries it." They took the petition to London in the early summer, and they went not to Westminster but to the offices of the Morning Chronicle, where a young journalist named Pemberton — no relation, though the coincidence pleased Arthur — agreed to publish the petition in full, along with an editorial that asked the uncomfortable question: who was the railway serving, and at what cost? The editorial ran on the front page, and it was reprinted in half the provincial papers, and it reached the ears of men in Parliament who had been wondering whether the Pemberton amendment was a mistake or merely a postponement. The second committee sat in the autumn, in the same low-ceilinged room, and this time Mr. Marbury did not look certain. The petition had been a blow he had not anticipated, and it had struck not at the company's right to build but at the moral authority of its arguments. He spoke anyway, with the same fluency and force, but his eyes kept drifting to the gallery, where Arthur and Eleanor sat beside Marie, who had come down from the schoolhouse to see what her brother was doing, and beside a woman Arthur had not expected — Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who had served four earls and who now stood in the gallery with her hands folded and her chin raised, listening to every word as though she were still the keeper of the estate's conscience. When it was Arthur's turn to speak, he did not speak as a lord. He spoke as a man who had walked the valley and counted the families and measured the water, and he brought with him the photographs — the first photographs, taken by a travelling daguerreotypist who had charged the village a shilling a head — of the common in summer, of the schoolhouse in session, of the village green where children played and old women sat and the geese wandered free. He laid them on the table before the committee, and he pointed to each one and told them the story it contained. "This is the common," he said. "It is not merely grass. It is a place where the poor of this valley make their living, and where their children learn to be independent, and where, in a hundred years' time, they will teach their children the same. This is the schoolhouse. It was built by the village, before the company offered to endow it, and it teaches three hundred girls to read, because Miss Pemberton believed, as I believe, that a girl who can read is a woman who can think for herself. And this —" he touched the last photograph, of the village at dusk, the windows glowing yellow in the cold light, "— is home. Not a sentiment. A fact. Six hundred and forty-three people live here. They are not obstacles to progress. They are the people progress is supposed to serve." The chairman, Lord Tarrant, looked at the photographs, and then at Arthur, and then at the members of the committee, and he did not need to say a word. The second verdict, delivered three days later, was the same as the first in its essentials — the line would be rerouted, the village would be spared, the school would be endowed — but it carried one additional clause that neither side had proposed. The company was to build a footbridge across the line at the point where the old road to the village had been severed, so that the villagers could reach the station without traversing the company's land. It was a small thing, a thing that cost the company little and meant everything to the village, and Arthur understood, with the sudden clarity of a man who has spent too long looking at the horizon, that it was the work not of his own eloquence but of the photographs, of the faces on the paper, of the simple fact that six hundred and forty-three human beings had stepped forward and said: we are here. He returned to the valley in the October rain, and he and Eleanor walked the length of the new footbridge — a handsome structure of iron and timber, built by the company's own men, standing at the point where the old road had been cut — and they stood there in the rain and looked down at the valley below, and Arthur felt the old fear settle in his chest, not because he thought the battle was won but because he understood, at last, that battles were never won. They were only postponed, and the victory lay not in the outcome but in the willingness to fight, and to fight again, and to fight for the next generation, who would face different storms and different lies and different men with different flags and measuring rods. The bridge was dedicated on a Sunday in November, and the whole village came, and the vicar blessed it, and Beppe's circus performed on the common, and old Mrs. Danvers stood at the back of the crowd with her arms folded and her face unreadable, and Leo stood beside Arthur and Eleanor and said nothing at all, because there was nothing left to say.