Chapter 63 The Counter-Petition

The counter-petition against the Union bill was engrossed on parchment in Graves's best round hand during the last week of May, and it was a document of a kind the county had never produced before, though it would produce imitations within two sessions. Hollis had drafted it upon a principle he stated once and never repeated: that petitions fail when they beg, and succeed when they inform. So the vale's petition did not lament, and did not implore the House to spare a picturesque valley. It recited — in clauses numbered like the articles of a treaty — the sworn facts of 1843 and 1844: the four seasons of borings, the failing rings of wells plotted inward upon the parish, the burst collar at the closes, the interim order, the trial, the perpetual injunction, and the Master's paragraph, quoted entire, about the law pausing at the mouth of a shaft. Then it prayed the House to refuse standing powers of drainage within two miles of the line, until the nature of the ground between the escarpment and the common had been examined upon evidence, and it offered to bring that evidence to Westminster at the petitioners' own charge. Graves carried it up to London himself, by the night coach, with a copy of every affidavit in a locked deal box chained to his wrist, and the sight of the little solicitor alighting at the George Inn with his box and his chains did more for the tale of Ashworth in the capital than the Chronicle's columns had done; for clerks and porters repeat what they see, and by Friday the story of the chained box had grown a padlock and two bulldogs, and was told in three clubs as far north as Portland Place. While Graves fought the formal battle, the vale fought the war of print. The Chronicle — whose correspondent had never quite gone home after the trial — took Marie's great well-map, reduced it upon wood, and printed it across two columns with the failing measurements of 1843 set against the recovery of 1844, under the heading THE PARISH THAT KEPT BOOKS. Letters came down by every coach after that: engineers who wanted Fenwick's charts, a Fellow of the Geological Society who asked leave to visit and arrived with a hammer and left with a copy of the Watch-book entries and a face like a man converted against his will; and one letter, in a broad Cornish fist smelling of tar, which Trevanion wrote from Camborne, and which proved in the event to contain the most consequential sentence of the whole correspondence. "I have sunk levels in eight counties," the Captain wrote, "and I will tell your lordship what no printed plan will show you. When a coalowner cannot get an act to do a thing, he does the lawful half of it upon his own ground and waits for the act to forgive the rest. The lawful half of drainage is an adit — a level driven out to daylight on a gentle fall, to carry water from his workings to a river. Driven on the right bearing, such a level is a straw in a jug. Run it southward along the strike of those strata for mile upon mile, as our grandfathers ran them in Cornwall, and it will drink its way toward any wet ground it is pointed at, lawful as Sunday, needing no Parliament at all. Look north, my lord. Whatever your enemy means to finish in the committee rooms, mark my words, he has already begun with a pick." Fenwick read that letter aloud in the library on the evening it came, and then sat looking at the fire with the paper loose in his fingers, because his own private arithmetic had been whispering the same word for a fortnight and he had refused to hear it. The mother-water stood above its old level and crept upward still — a finger's width in a fortnight, patient as grass — with every bore capped, sealed, inspected, and sworn. Drainage of their own making had ended in March. Rain explained nothing; the season was dry. He had written in the Watch-book only the figures and no theory, because a surveyor who prints theories before figures is a politician; but the figures, read cold, had one plain meaning. Something was feeding the cistern from beyond the parish, from the direction of the watershed, where the only new works in the world were Lord Verrall's. He said none of this yet, even to Arthur. What he did instead was double the watch. The senior form's evening timing became two timings, taken at fixed hours by different children and compared; the capped bores were visited weekly instead of monthly; and he wrote privately to Trevanion asking, as one craftsman of another, what signs a man should look for at an old adit mouth newly reopened, and how soon such signs could be seen from a distance by a stranger on a hill. The answer came back inside a week, in the Captain's untutored and exact prose: fresh timber pale as a bone; spoil thrown wide and bright, not weathered; a tramway of rough sleepers if the level meant work; and water, my lord — watch the water coming out of it. Clear and warm and constant in drought is the signature of water that has been a long way underground. If you find that running from a hill where no pump works, you have found somebody's straw, and it will be pointing at your jug. On the last evening of June, a shepherd gathering strays on the high pasture above the common looked north at dusk along the long black line of the escarpment, and saw, five or six miles off, where the turf broke into old ironstone diggings, a glint of something pale among the scars that had not been pale before. He was not a fanciful man, and he noted it chiefly because of the lantern rule — the flame at the shaft head behind him, renewed nightly by tenants in rotation, the valley's own small star — and he mentioned it at the George on market day, the way shepherds mention things, in passing, over the tail of a conversation about dogs. Gillingwater heard it, and chalked nothing, and sent a boy up the drove road to the manor before supper. ---