Chapter 57 The Interim Order

The chambers of the Vice-Chancellor sat in Lincoln's Inn Old Square, and on the morning of the motion the corridor outside was crowded in a manner the ushers called unprecedented and the newspaper men called the vale's doing. The tenants who had come up by the night coach — a dozen of them, Thomas Gillingwater at their head, in their good coats with their Sunday faces — were not permitted to speak; they were not even parties. They stood along the wall with their hats held before them like men at a graveside, and their silent weight did what silence does in such rooms, which is more than speech. Prendergast opened for the company, and he was as good as his reputation. The bill was a lawful grant of Parliament. The closes were lawfully purchased. The trust was untouchable and untouched; nothing the company proposed touched trust land. As for the water — he handled the word like something unpleasant on a fish-knife — the evidence was a schoolboy's map, a rhyming superstition, an ex-surveyor nursing a grievance, and a Cornishman whose logs proved only that bores find water, which is why one sinks them. Coal was the wealth of the nation; sentiment was the luxury of those already warm. The Vice-Chancellor interrupted him once, and the interruption was the hinge of the morning. "Mr. Prendergast, I have read your act. It authorises works within six hundred yards of the line. Does it authorise them where those works would, upon sworn evidence, endanger the water supply of some thousands of persons?" Prendergast bowed. "It authorises works, my lord. Whether they endanger anything is precisely what is not sworn but asserted — by interested parties." "Everything before me," said the Vice-Chancellor drily, "is asserted by somebody. Sit down while I consider whose assertions carry iron." Hollis replied for the trustees, with Graves beside him to mind the forms, and he did not waste a syllable defending sentiment. He gave the court Trevanion's logs, sworn; Fenwick's charts, sworn; Murchison's field books, sworn by the man who kept them; the letters of 1796, sworn to by Mrs. Tollervey's vicar; and lastly the affidavit of the descent, read aloud in the hushed room from beginning to end, so that the words chalked on the bulkhead eighty years ago fell into the legal air of the nineteenth century like stones into a well: *WATER IS MASTER HERE.* "The question before your Honour," Hollis said, "is whether the court will hold its hand while it examines, properly and at leisure, what lies beneath this parish. The plaintiffs say coal. The defendants' grandfather wrote water. Both may be right; that is precisely the danger. A man who drills through a lid to see what is under it cannot un-drill the hole if he dislikes the view. We ask for time, measured in weeks, upon ground measured in fathoms." The Vice-Chancellor, a dry neat man with a deaf ear reputed and neither ear actually affected, took nine days. When the interim order came it was everything Hollis had drafted and one thing he had not dared to ask: the company, its servants and agents, were restrained from sinking, boring, or driving any works within the area bounded by the common, the eastern lane, the ridge freehold strip, and the closes below it, until the trial of the whole matter before the Master of the Rolls next term; and the company was further directed to show cause, at the same hearing, why it should not be compelled to cap and keep capped every bore it had driven within a mile of the common. Costs of the day, against them. They came out of the square into a hard London noon with the frost making iron of the railings, and Thomas Gillingwater shook each of them by the hand in turn as though they had carried something heavy up stairs together, which, in a sense, they had. The tenants went up to Holborn to see the printed account of the motion in that evening's Chronicle — the first time, Gillingwater said, staring at the column as at a portrait, that the vale's affairs had ever been set in type where strangers might read them — and Hollis let them stand in the cold looking at it, because he knew better than any man living what such print does to people who have never been printed. Prendergast passed them at the gate without expression, but paused, and said to Graves, conversationally, in the hearing of all: "Interim orders, sir, are the weather. The term is the climate." The night coach home took two days over roads the thaw had turned to porridge, and Arthur slept in fits and woke each time with the beat of the water in his ears, nine to the minute, patient as tide. At the last change before home the landlord of the coaching inn pressed on him a mug of hot ale unasked, saying the whole house had read of Ashworth in the papers and wanted him to know it; and Arthur, drinking it by the fire with coachmen and carriers nodding to him across the room like equals, understood that he was travelling through a country that had already made up its mind about the valley, kindly, without being asked. It was full dark on the second evening when the coach set him down at the manor gates, and Catherine met him in the hall with a lamp, and he knew before she spoke, because forty years had taught her that bad tidings go to the master of a house first and gently. "You are home in time," she said. "The lane flooded yesterday while you were on the road. Nothing lost but a Christmas goose and the Widow Carker's cellar; Eleanor had the village cart sand all night, and Marie's seniors worked the buckets like firemen, and I have never seen the girl prouder of anything she taught them." She paused at the library door. "But my lord — Mr. Fenwick has been twice up the hill since the order came, and he asks for you the moment you can stand. He says the shaft has begun to sing." Fenwick was waiting in the library with his notebook open and the look Arthur had learned on the face of no man yet except once, long ago, on a surgeon's. He did not preface it. He turned the book so the lamplight fell across a column of figures, and said: "The heartbeat. Nine to the minute when we stood at the seal in November. Eight when I checked at midmonth. Tonight, at the shaft mouth itself — without bar, without iron, audible to Thomas Gillingwater, who is no fanciful witness — it stands at seven. The pressure behind the clay is rising, my lord, or the clay is thinning, and either way the clock we thought we had until spring has been quietly running since the first bore went through the cap rock four winters ago." He shut the notebook. "The court has bought us weeks. The hill is lending us less."