Chapter 74 The Deepest of the Nine

They cut the thorn on the Monday with leave of the trustees entered in the minute-book and sworn witnesses at every stage, because Hollis had drilled them all winter in one commandment: that a discovery is only as strong as the chain of hands between it and a courtroom. Trevanion superintended the hood stones with a tenderness that surprised the estate men, who had expected fireworks from Cornwall and got liturgy instead. Each stone was numbered in chalk, eased up on rollers of oak, and set aside upon spades in its order; and when the last was off, there lay revealed a timbered well-head eight feet across, black with age but sound under the Captain's knife, breathing up at them out of the dark a warm air that smelled — Hobbs, summoned to identify everything in the parish by smell, said it exactly — like the breath of cattle in a covered fold at evening. The shaft went down forty-one feet, ladders new-set against staples old, Fenwick counting rungs as he had counted them at the ring, Davy lamps below and daylight above and the bell-code agreed: one stroke each quarter-hour, three for come up, continuous for catastrophe. At the bottom the diggers broke through a wall of dry rubble into a chamber not dug but made — floored with slate, walled with drystone, roofed on two oak beams — and stood back to let the principals descend in the order the trustees' resolution named. Vane came down last, on Arthur's arm, an old man descending into his grandfather's mind. The lamp-light found the walls written over. Chalk, renewed where rain could never reach it, faded where lamps had smoked it, columns and columns of it in three generations of hands: depths against dates, tastes rendered in the tasters' own vocabulary — *sweet, sweet, sweetish, sick, SALT* — temperatures guessed by feel and recorded beside the seasons, and down the eastern wall, tall as a man, the master-column itself: the deep water's level, marked week by week across eighty years of winters. Arthur walked the lines slowly with the lamp raised, and the others kept silence, and what he read was the whole argument of the vale compressed into a scripture of small marks. He found the salt year standing out of the page like a mountain range seen from a road, exactly as Marie's children had drawn it from the registers — *SALT, SALT, SALT* across three summers, then the long climb back toward sweetness through 1767 and 1768, and beside the first sweet reading a note in a cramped triumphant hand: *The drain runs true. She walks to the river. God and the Bybrook be praised.* And he found the last entry of all, dated the year of the sealing, in Joseph Vane's upright script, larger than the rest, as if written kneeling: *Ninth sister stopped. The mother lies deeper than hope and nearer than fear. I seal the eight and leave the door. Let them that come after read this wall before they boast, and remember: she was salt once within this valley's memory, and we cured her once within this valley's memory, and the cure is a channel, and the channel can be kept or cut.* "Eighty years of evidence," Fenwick said at last, unsteadily, Arthur kept the lamp moving along the master-column while the others worked, and twice Vane stopped him with a raised hand, once at a winter of readings sixty years gone where the deep water stood four feet lower than any living man had known it, and once at a cluster of marks in the year 1794 where the taster's hand changed mid-column and the words *she listens too* were written small beside the depth. "My grandfather's father's hand," Vane said quietly. "I never knew what he meant by it. I am not sure I wish to learn now." They copied what could be copied and photographed nothing, because there was nothing to photograph with; "in a hand no lawyer can call hired." He worked till the bell rang them up, photographing nothing because there was nothing to photograph it with, but copying every column fair into the Watch-book by lamplight while Protheroe the elder read the figures aloud behind him like a clerk at audit; and the copy alone, sworn twice, would have made the fortune of any barrister alive. But the chamber held one thing more. In the north wall, low and half-hidden by a facing slab, a blocked archway showed its outline where the smoke of eighty lamps had kept the chalk bright: a doorway a man could crawl through, closed with drystone packed from the far side, and over the arch, in letters an inch high, the direction every search had waited eighty years for: *TO THE RIVER BY THE CURE. FIVE FEET FALL IN THE HUNDRED. KEEP HER WALKING.* Trevanion put his palm flat on the blocking, as he had put it to timbers all his life, and left it there a long moment, reading the wall the way other men read instruments. Then he took out his chalk, and beneath the old inscription, in a hand as plain as a sermon, he added the answer of the present generation, so that whoever came next — friend or Union, lawyer or child — should know the state of play: *SHE STILL WALKS. WE FOUND THE DOOR. NOW FIND THE MEN WHO KEPT IT.* Trevanion stood back from his own chalk the way a man steps back from a signed confession, and Vane, who had watched every stroke, put out two fingers and touched the old letters above the new, father-hand and stranger-hand together on the same stone, and said nothing that anyone wrote down. That evening the count was taken early, by full dark, because word of the door had run the lanes ahead of the lamps coming home; and the rim of the ring held more people than the well-club could muster for a dividend. The captain of the senior form took the time against the church clock across the valley, being too far from any lantern to trust a watch-face, and the parish heard the figure pass from mouth to mouth down the hill without anyone raising their voice above conversation: five to the minute still, but the strokes deeper, Fenwick thought, than September's — though he declined, in writing, to swear to depth. The count that week, taken nightly at the rim stone by the senior form in their turns, went down to five. ---