Chapter 52 The Ring of Stones

The story, as Vane told it that morning, with the ledger open on his knees and the sun coming up red behind the eastern ridge, was simple in the way of all true things. His grandfather had driven a level westward under the common in search of the deeper measures, because the seam above was thinning and a family does not eat estimates. For nine months the ground had behaved. Then, in one week of autumn, the behaviour changed. The air in the heading grew warm though the winter shut down above. Water stood in the low places of the floor overnight where no water had been bred by any rain. And when Josiah Vane put his ear to the face of the rock, as miners do, he heard what he described in the ledger only once, and then never wrote again, though he lived eleven years: not the drip and trickle of ordinary drainage, but a sound with weight in it, far off, rhythmic, like the breathing of some animal asleep in a room below the world. "He thought at first he had opened into old workings," Vane said. "Workings of the monks, perhaps, or of the old men before the Conquest, who dug for iron where our grandfathers dug for coal. He walked the level with two of his brothers and a lamp, expecting at any step to find their marks upon the wall. He found nothing. No pick-scar, no tally, no soot. Only rock, and behind the rock, that breathing. Then his brother drove a test-bore through the face — a hand's breadth, no more — and plugged it with clay, because in the instant after the bore went through, the clay they had brought for the purpose whistled in the hole. Whistled, my lord. Air being drawn inward. The ground beyond was drinking." Arthur looked at the ring of stones. The frost was going off it now, and the grass within the rim was darker than the grass without, and always had been, the shepherds said, though no one had ever asked why. "And your grandfather understood what it was," he said. "In time. He was an educated man for a miner — his father had been schoolmaster at the vale's first school, before there was ever a Pemberton in the parish — and he did what such men do: he measured, and he wrote, and he waited. The water in the bores rose and fell with the seasons, late, as deep water does. It rose when the vale was wet and sank when the vale was dry. It was warm in winter and cool in summer. It was, my lord, the spring-head itself — the mother-water that feeds every well from the eastern lane to the river meadows — held up there in the broken ground above the coal, sealed under the cap of hard rock by nature, as a cistern is sealed by its lid. His family had spent three generations cutting holes in that lid. They stopped the work in the spring, and he set his mark beside the shaft as a warning in the only language every digging man would read, and he spent the rest of his life keeping the valley from finishing what it had begun. That is the inheritance he left us. Not a fortune. A duty." Fenwick came up the hill within the hour, riding with his instrument case strapped behind the saddle like a surgeon at a country accident. He heard the tale standing, with his hat off, though the wind on the hill had teeth in it; then he knelt at the ring of stones and went to work as though the two men were not there. He measured the depth of water within the stones with a graduated rod. He took the temperature of it against the temperature of the well at the foot of the hill, which he had sampled in the spring. He held a thread of thistledown at the mouth of the old shaft and watched it lean inward, steadily, like a compass needle finding north. "The shaft breathes inward this morning because the pressure is falling ahead of weather," he said at last, half to himself. "That is common enough in old workings — a hill inhales and exhales with the barometer. But the rate—" He made a note. "My lord, I sounded this ring in April, when the company's men first came. The water stood four feet below the rim stones. It stands now eighteen inches below them. Whatever else has happened this year, the mother-water is rising, and it has risen faster since the summer than before it." He looked up at Arthur, and his young face was very sober. "Someone has put straws into the seal. Four surveys' worth of bores, my lord, each one a needle through the cap rock, and needles run both ways." They came down the drove road together, the earl, the geologist, and the last of the Vanes, and at the foot of the hill Thomas Gillingwater met them at a walk that was worse than running, with his chalk-stained tailboard coat buttoned wrong. "You are wanted at the manor, my lord," he said. "A cart came over the boundary at first light, before God or the overseer was stirring. Rods, and boring irons, and the parts of a small engine, and men with a Cornish tongue among them. They have set up on the freehold strip along the ridge, inside their own fence, and they are making a platform for the engine even now. Mr. Devereux's agent is with them. He gave me this paper and bid me give it to your lordship with his compliments." It was a notice of intention to bore and sink, served with all the correctness that money could buy. Arthur read it twice, and then folded it, very slowly, along lines already worn by folding. "They mean to have their own needle in before the week is out," he said. "Very well. We shall see whether the law moves as fast as a boring rod. Mr. Fenwick, you will swear an affidavit tonight of everything you have measured. Mr. Hollis must have the whole of it by Friday's post. And Mr. Vane—" He paused, because what he intended next had no precedent in five years of fighting for the vale, and because he meant it more than anything he had yet said on the hill. "Mr. Vane, the trustees meet on Sunday, in the church porch, after service. The valley should hear this from both of us together. Your grandfather kept its water, and mine kept its secret, and neither of them told the people who drink it. That account stands open between our families and the vale. Come and help us close it." Vane stood very still for a moment, a man sixty years accustomed to being outside walls being asked into one. Then he bowed, not deeply, but with both shoulders, like a labourer taking up a load. "I will come," he said. "God knows I have rehearsed it long enough."