Chapter 66 The Salt

Fenwick came at first light, and the parish registers came with him by arrangement with the vicar, and for three days the library at Ashworth became a place of dust and arithmetic such as it had not been since the winter of the affidavits. The registers gave the salt year a population: in the summer of 1766 and the two summers following, the burials of the eastern lane rose — infants chiefly, and old men taken off by fevers the clerk wrote down as *putrid*; the hay accounts in the estate's own books showed the meadows let at half rent for those years and recovering at Lady Day 1769. And in the Vane ledger, which Aldous fetched up from its case behind the panelling and laid open with his two hands like a man laying out a relative, they found the confirmation he had half known was there and had never turned to look at: on the flyleaf of the second hand's period, in Matthew Vane's smaller writing, a note no one had read as more than piety — *My father spoke ever of the salt year. The drain is the cure and must be kept. God keep the vale.* "So it is a cycle," Fenwick said at last, standing over the three sources laid side by side upon the long table — register, letter, ledger — "and not a mystery. The cistern overtops or breaks, at intervals we may guess to be lifetimes; the brine floods whatever workings lie open; the wells sicken; and the ground heals itself only where men have driven it a way to the river. Your grandfather's adit, my lord, is not merely a safety valve. It is the third surgeon of that wound, and there were two before him whose names are lost." He looked up, and his face had the stillness Arthur had learned to distrust and rely on. "Now hear what follows, because it is the whole parliamentary case compressed into one sentence. A water that has poisoned this valley within living record, and been cured twice by secret labour, lies today a fathom higher than any man now dead saw it — fed from the north by a straw we have not found — and the bill before Parliament proposes to put forty miles of shafts and levels into the ground at the end of that straw, under powers that would make the feeding lawful." Vane listened to all of it from the window seat, an old man now of sixty-eight whom the spring had visibly begun to bend, and when Fenwick had done he spoke to Arthur rather than to either of them. "My lord, I have kept my grandfather's rite alone, and then with witnesses, and I am near the end of keeping anything. Before the committee sits, you and Mr. Fenwick should learn what I learned between nine and twenty: the face of the seal — how clay takes a repacking, how to read sweat from shine, how a bulkhead speaks before it fails. Not because your hands will do it. Because the vale must never again stand upon its heart while the last man who knows its face walks ahead of his coffin. My family kept this duty sixty years short of a century, and we kept it badly at the end — in silence, without heirs. Let it pass now, properly, while passing is still possible." Marie's part was played in daylight and in ink. She set her seniors upon the salt year as a problem in evidence: the burial figures ruled against the harvest accounts, year by year, until the crisis of 1766–68 stood out upon their chart like a mountain range seen from a road — three bad summers rising out of two generations of plenty, then the long convalescence. The children asked why no one had ever told them, and Marie gave them the only honest answer she had. "Because keeping the books and telling the tale were given to different people, and neither side believed the other could be trusted with both. You are the first form in this valley's history to hold them together. Sign your chart accordingly." They signed it accordingly, eleven names in a column, and the chart hung thereafter in the schoolroom beside the great well-map, so that any child entering the room learned before arithmetic what the ground beneath the slate floor had once done and might do again. And through the hot weeks of July, while the bill's second reading approached and Hollis wrote up from Westminster that the Union's agents had engaged rooms for ninety followers, the heir of the Pembertons knelt in the ninety-foot chamber with a mason's apron over his coat and learned the craft of the Vanes. Vane taught as his grandfather must have taught, with few words and endless patience: how puddled clay is tempered with the very water it will face, kneaded until it takes the print of a thumb and keeps it without shining; how a facing stone is set not level but leaning into the pressure, so that every fathom the water gains closes the joint instead of opening it; the difference, shown by lamplight across a palm's width of wall, between the damp of a healthy seal breathing and the bright lacquer-shine of a seal sweating in disease. He taught him too the smaller sacraments of the trade — that a man working at a seal works alone or with witnesses sworn to silence, never with hired hands; that the tools come out of the hill by the same ladder they went in, always counted; the rite of the candle in its niche, and the words — few, and older than any church — said at the setting of it. Fenwick measured and drew everything, and made the senior form copy the drawings fair into the Watch-book against a day when neither teacher nor pupil would climb the ladders. On the last evening of the instruction they sat above ground by the ring until the light went, and Vane, looking at the water lying quiet within the stones, said the thing he had carried up the hill with him like a third lantern. "I was wrong once, my lord, and I will say it here where she can hear. When I asked you to the shaft head and told you the basin was ours, I meant it — and it was the old bitterness speaking, not the truth. The truth is the reverse of mine and always was. No family owns this water, nor this duty. We are only its hands for our season, and the shame is not in holding the post but in dying before another hand is taught to take it." He rose, stiffly, and took up his stick. "Come, then. One more count before dark, and then home, for tomorrow we go up to London and speak to the gentlemen who believe a nation runs on coal alone, and we must be very fresh and very patient. For they are not wicked, most of them. They are only men who have never been thirsty." ---