Chapter 51 The Night Ledger

Catherine did not leave the library when the box was open. She took the candlestick from the desk and set it where the light would fall across Arthur's shoulder, and she stood with her hands folded in her apron in the manner of a woman who has carried a thing so long that its weight has become a part of her posture, and she waited while he turned the leaves. The ledger was bound in boards that had once been grey and were now the colour of a sheep's backbone, and it was heavy in the way of books that have been carried in coats and set on wet stone. Three hands moved through it across the years. The first was a large, confident script, the letters upright as fence posts, and it ran for page after page through figures that meant nothing until one learned to read them: depths in fathoms, widths in yards, the word *coal* appearing again and again like a refrain — coal at nineteen fathoms under the nine acres, coal at twenty-three under the eastern hedge, coal good and clean, coal mixed with sulphur, coal gone. Then, near the middle of the book, the hand changed. It became smaller. It became careful in the way of a man writing not accounts but warnings, and the refrain changed too. *Water in the deep level tonight. Rose a fathom while we ate our bread.* *Bore driven eastward under the common. Ground rang hollow above us, like the lid of a pot. Stopped.* *The water is warm. There should be no warmth in it.* Arthur read these entries aloud, because he found he could not read them silently; they seemed to require a voice, the way a psalm requires one. Catherine listened without moving. When he reached an entry dated in a hard winter sixty years gone — *The spring by the lane came up bitter this morning. The old men say the sinking did it. We are digging into something that was sleeping* — he heard her draw breath. "Josiah Vane wrote that," she said. "He came to the back door that same winter. I was a girl in the still-room, and I answered it, and he stood there with his boots in ruins from the adit mud and asked for the old earl, who was not yet old, and I heard him say through the door, as plain as I hear you now: *We have found the valley's heart, my lord, and it is not ours to take.* The earl went out to him, and they walked up the drove road together in the snow, and what was said between them no one living knows. But the workings stopped that spring. The men were paid off at Lady Day, and the Vanes went over the ridge to the county town, and the valley told itself the coal had failed, and believed it, because believing it was easier than wondering." The third hand was Aldous Vane's — smaller still, and very even, the hand of a man who had been taught to write by someone who loved exactness. Its entries thinned as the years thinned, and then they ceased altogether, in the year before Arthur's birth. After them came four blank leaves, and then the single line in the fourth hand, the hand Arthur had known all his life on the flyleaves of books and the backs of cheques: *The seal is not a lock. It is a promise.* At the end of the book, folded into the binding, was a plan drawn in ink gone brown — the common, the shaft head, the ring of stones at its centre, and nine points marked about it in a circle like the numbers of a clock face. Arthur counted them, and counted again. Eight were set along the eastern lane and the lanes that fed it, spaced where wells would stand. The ninth was the ring itself. "The wells," Catherine said quietly. "He drew the wells of the vale. My lord, your grandfather kept the map of every house that drinks." Arthur sat back, and the fire had burned to a red seam along the grate, and outside the windows the park lay black under a sky going towards the coldest hour. He thought of his father coming down from the hill with the ledger under his coat, and sealing it behind panelling, and saying nothing for forty years; and he understood that silence, which had looked like coldness to a boy, had been the heaviest kind of labour, performed daily, without witnesses. "Fetch me pen and paper," he said. "And then go to bed, Catherine. You have kept this vigil longer than I have." "I will fetch the pen," she said. "As to bed — I have slept well for forty years knowing where that box stood. I will sleep well tomorrow knowing what is in it." He wrote until the windows went grey: to Hollis in London, that the story of the ground might be got ready against the moment it was needed; to Fenwick, that his instruments might be brought up the hill; and last, a short note he hesitated over, because it was not business but courtesy, and courtesy between enemies is a door that opens only once. He wrote it anyway. Then he saddled his own horse, alone, and rode up the drove road in the first light, with the ledger in his breast pocket and the frost smoking off the hedgerows. Vane was already at the shaft head. He had been there all night, by the look of him — the lantern beside him burnt down to a coin of cold glass, his coat white on the shoulders with rime — and when Arthur dismounted and held out the ledger without a word, Vane took it in both hands the way a man takes back a child he had given up for dead. "You read it," he said. It was not a question. "All night," Arthur said. "Now tell me what your grandfather told yours, Mr. Vane, and tell it plain. What did he find under the common?" Vane looked down the shaft, where the dark stood up like a wall, and then he looked at the ring of stones, silvered with frost inside its rim, and when he spoke his voice was low and even, the voice of a man laying out tools in order before beginning work. "He found that the valley does not stand on coal," he said. "It stands on water."