Chapter 46 The Grand Western

Arthur did not go up the far hill that night. He had learned, in five years of guarding the vale, that a man who walks into a survey in the dark hands the advantage to the surveyors. He stood at the window of the library and watched the lamps move along the ridge until they were quenched, and he read the prospectus of the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company twice more, and then he wrote to Mr. Hollis of the Reform Intelligencer, whose favour had been bought before at a price the valley could afford, and he asked the only question that mattered: who had registered the company, and what did the registration disclose? The answer came back from London in five days, in Hollis's compact, precise hand, and Arthur read it in the library with Eleanor beside him and Catherine at the door, and the answer was careful, and the answer was complete, and the answer was this: the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company had been registered in February, with a nominal capital of two hundred thousand pounds, of which a sum barely sufficient to pay the surveyors' wages had been subscribed. The registered offices were a room above a printer's in the City, and the directors were three men of the kind that appear on the prospectuses of companies that exist chiefly on paper — a retired navy captain, a bankrupt mercer, and a clergyman of no fixed benefice. The company had filed, in the same month, a petition for a private bill in Parliament: a bill to authorise a branch railway from the county town to the eastern boundary of the vale, together with powers of compulsory purchase over a strip of land six hundred yards wide, running along the ridge above the common and descending toward the lower meadows. The petition was signed, as the law required, by the company's solicitors. But at the foot of the petition, in the line reserved for the name of the party by whom the proceedings were instructed, there was a name that Arthur had seen before, in the fine print of a prospectus he had carried out of a committee room and locked away in his desk. The name was Vane. Hollis's letter went on, and Arthur read it slowly, because every sentence was a fact, and every fact was a trap being sprung. The syndicate that Vane had run against the estate in the previous year had collapsed — Arthur had watched it collapse, in the committee room, with the postscript of Lombard Street in his hand — but it had not died. It had been reorganised. The papers of the old syndicate had been bought up, at a fraction of their face value, by a purchaser who had acted through no fewer than four intermediaries, and the last of the four had been a clerk in the office of the solicitors now acting for the Grand Western. The survey that had begun on the far hill in April was not the first survey of the vale. It was the fifth. The first four had been conducted over the winter, quietly, at night, by men who had walked the boundary fences with theodolites in the dark, and their reports had been filed, not with the county surveyor, but with the office of the Grand Western in the room above the printer's in the City. "They have been measuring the vale for a year," Arthur said, when he had finished reading. "They know the shape of the basin better than we do. They know the depth of the seam, the state of the drainage, the lie of every field along the eastern boundary. And they know that the mineral rights are locked in the trust — which means they know the only way to reach them." "The only way," Hollis had written, in the last paragraph of his letter, "is through the trust itself. A company cannot buy what a trust has no power to sell. But a Parliament can. The bill before the House does not ask for the mineral rights. It asks for a railway. And a railway, once authorised, carries with it powers of compulsory purchase over land in its path — and the power, in cases where a trust holds land that cannot be alienated, to have the value of that land paid into court, where any party with an interest may petition for it. The trust was built to keep the earth from being sold. But it was not built to keep the earth from being taken, by due process, at a fair price, for the benefit of those the trust was meant to serve. Mr. Vane has read the deed, my lord. He has found the door in it. And he is walking through it with a bill in one hand and a railway in the other." Arthur stood at the window and looked out at the far hill, where the surveyors had not returned, because they did not need to return — the season of surveying was over, and the season of Parliament had begun. "They will not need to cross the boundary at all," he said, to the room, to Eleanor, to Catherine, to the valley beyond the glass. "They will take the ground beside it, and the line will end at the edge of the trust land, and the value of the coal beneath our feet will rise and rise until the trustees are compelled — by law, by duty, by the very words of the deed that was meant to protect it — to let it go." "Then we fight the bill," Eleanor said. "We have fought before." "We have," Arthur said. "But this time the enemy is not a syndicate that can be exposed. This time the enemy is Parliament itself — and Parliament is the only court in England that a railway cannot be argued out of by a speech." He sat down at the desk and took up his pen, and he wrote to Hollis to instruct him in the only strategy that remained: not to defeat the bill, but to be present at every stage of it, and to learn, from the men who drafted it, exactly how far Vane's design extended. The lamps on the far hill had been quenched. But the survey, Arthur understood, was not over. It had merely moved indoors.