Chapter 65 The Last of the Tollerveys

Mrs. Tollervey sent for Arthur on the ninth of July, by the boy who carried the well-club's accounts, with a message dictated in the voice the parish had known for sixty years and obeyed in matters of gardens and conscience alike: *Tell his lordship to come while the light is good, and to bring nothing, and to stay past suppertime.* She had been failing since the anniversary of the third evening at the ring — she reckoned her calendar by it now, she told the doctor, since the water had taught her to count again — and everyone in the eastern lane understood what the summons was, and no one said so. He walked up the lane through the evening haymaking, past cottages where wells stood sweet and full again, and found her propped in the parlour chair by the window where sixty years had rooted her, very small now within her black, her eyes clear as a girl's and impatient as ever of ceremony. On the table beside her lay a bundle tied in the flannel of an old petticoat, and she put her hand on it before she greeted him, because she had rehearsed the order of things and meant to keep it. "Now, my lord," she said. "Eleanor has been to sit with me, and the schoolchildren sent their book to be read to me, and I am content with my accounts. But there is a debt in this house that is yours to collect, and I will not have it sold with the furniture by people who cannot read it. Take these." She pushed the bundle across. "My grandmother's letters, and her mother's before hers, and God knows what is at the bottom of the knot. My grandmother watched the sealing from the lane when she was nine, and kept silent as she was bid, and hated the bidding all her life, and so she wrote what she could not say into letters nobody sees, and hid them, and told me of them the week I was married, with the same instruction. Silence, and then the truth, to whoever asked properly. You asked properly, my lord, in your church porch, sixty years late. Read them. And when you find the salt year — for you will find it, it is why I am sending them — remember that the old people never said the vale had never tasted brine. They said it had tasted it once, and been healed, and that the healing was the miracle, not the wound." She talked then, as the light went gold and then grey, with the rambling precision of the dying, of the sealing day and the silence of the men; of her husband, dead at Sedgemoor's peace in trade in Bristol, and the son in India, and the closes that had gone to the widow Harbury's kin. She asked after the school's well-book and corrected, from memory, a depth entered wrong by a child three years dead of the fever, as though the figure were a plant she had watered herself. And once, sharply, interrupting herself as though correcting a clerk: "Mind — the water was never wicked. Whatever the verse says. It kept faith better than we did. It is men who break faith with containers, my lord, not water." Arthur stayed past suppertime as commanded, and held her hand for the last half hour, and she died on the fourth day after, in her sleep, at eighty-nine, with the window open to the eastern lane. The valley buried her from the parish church on a morning of high July, and it seemed to Arthur, walking behind the coffin behind the farmers behind the school, that half the graves in that churchyard held people who had spent their lives keeping faith with containers — with sealed boxes behind panelling, with clay cores, with unsaid instructions, with ledgers of warning — and that the whole history of the vale was a relay of silence passed hand to hand until someone asked properly. The vicar read the words. The senior form of the Academy stood at the graveside in their best, and after the amen, without instruction and to the visible alarm of the organist, they sang the grandmothers' verse — *Dig deep, drink sweet* — slowly, as a psalm; and the congregation took it up verse by verse until the lane rang with it, and old Hobbs the shepherd wept without shame, and the sun came out over the churchyard wall as if summoned by contract. That night, alone in the library with the flannel bundle unknotting under his hands, Arthur came down through three generations of small neat hands — recipes, births, prices of calico, the small change of vanished households — and then, in a letter dated the twelfth of October, 1766, in ink the colour of strong tea, he found what she had promised. *—and the meadows spoiled again this year with the salt water, as in my mother's girlhood, the hay burned brown and the cattle's tongues raw at the trough, and the wells of the eastern lane bitter as brack. The men of the hill have been three summers about the cure. They drive the sick water a way to the river by a channel under the ground, as a surgeon sets a drain to an abscess, and this month the wells came sweet, and there was never a word of thanks fit to give, for the work is secret by reason I may not write. Only this, for whoever of our blood reads: the vale was salt once within memory of letter, and was healed by labour, not by luck. Let no one tell you the ground is kind. The ground is old, and it must be tended like anything old, and the tending falls to them that know, and knowing is a burden handed on in this family from death to death. I set it down here so that it shall not die with me.* Arthur sat a long while with the page. Then he fetched pen and paper, wrote one line to Fenwick, and sent the stable-boy with it into the dark: *Come at first light. Bring the parish registers. The water has been sick before — and cured.* ---