Chapter 78 The Watercourse

The chambers sat in Lincoln's Inn Old Square as they had sat for the interim order, and the crowd was greater, and Prendergast led for the Union this time with silk and juniors behind him and the whole doctrine of percolation in his grip like a mattock. He used it early and often. Whatever flowed beneath the vale, he argued, however romantically chalked, flowed through the earth, and water flowing through the earth was percolating water, and percolating water was, by the recent and binding authority of the Exchequer, nobody's — free to the first pump that reached it, immune from action howsoever used. The plaintiffs' case was a poem about a drain. If every private drain in England were elevated into a watercourse by proof of brickwork and sentiment, the law of the land would dissolve into a hundred thousand local superstitions, each parish a legislator, each well-head a court. And the salt dishes? Boiled residues weighed by a village schoolmaster — science, sir, of the kitchen. The weir boards? Measurements taken by interested persons in the dark of their own cellar. He was large, and smooth, and half right, and the room knew it, and feared it. Caulfield opened for the vale like a man laying bricks in a wall. First the nature of the thing: the Cure was no seepage and no gutter but an engineered channel, barrelled, graded, continuous, running by measured fall from a chamber of known antiquity toward a river of record — a watercourse underground in the precise sense the authorities had always excepted; and if counsel called that a poem, let him explain to the Vice-Chancellor why the same promoters' engineer had priced forty miles of tunnelled drainage as mere engineering when it served a railway, and as romance when it served a parish. Second the identity of the waters: not kitchen science but triangulated proof — temperature agreeing within a degree, saline residues agreeing in kind, the northern outflow and the ancient channel walking arm in arm beneath five miles of ground; sworn moreover by the very man who had drawn the Union's plates, present in the room, his field book produced under his hand. Third the intent: Prosser, brought up from Westfield, gave his evidence in a voice pitched for stable-yards and made the room lean forward — cylinders of engines, riveted mains by the ton, consigned over the summer months to Cinder Slack on the canal boats, waybills signed and kept; machinery, Caulfield observed, for raising and conducting water, ordered in quantity by a company whose counsel swore they sought only to drain a field. Prendergast cross-examined Prosser with courtesy and got nowhere, because the collier's son had kept duplicate waybills in his boot for six months against exactly this day. He fared worse with Murchison, The Chronicle's man summed the week in a paragraph the vale cut out and pasted into the well-club minute-book between two pages of penny accounts, where it sits yet: *The contest at Lincoln's Inn may be described plainly. On one side, an argument; on the other, a parish. The argument was better dressed. The parish had been underground.* who produced Braithwaite's field book of 1838 and read the entry at Cinder Slack aloud — *old workings dry, air warm* — and observed mildly that a field-drain for surface water had small need to note the warmth of the air it did not propose to move. And when he turned at last on Devereux, seeking the traitor's discount, the Vice-Chancellor stopped him with the dryness they remembered. "His character is not in issue between these parties, Mr. Prendergast. His plates are. Sit down while I consider whose assertions carry iron." Judgment was reserved eight days. One witness remained when the legal ammunition was spent, and Caulfield saved her deliberately for last, because rooms remember exits. The widow Harbury, seventy-nine, straight as a spade-haft, swore plainly to the night her closes drowned: the borehead collared to Mr. Devereux's specification, insured through offices recommended by the company's agents, running a week while her hay spoiled, abandoned to its collar the morning the inspectors were expected, and dry ever since — dry, she said, the way a mouth is dry that has been taught not to speak. Her damages were a matter for another day; her five minutes in the box were not evidence of hydrology at all. They were evidence of method, and the Vice-Chancellor, who had interrupted nobody else so much as twice, let her finish without a word and looked, for the first time that week, as though the case had stopped being an argument and become a set of facts. In those eight days two things happened that no one had scheduled. The first was a letter from York, in a clerk's hand, giving formal notice that the Midland Union had perfected papers of appeal against the interim order of August, and would move to have the whole matter carried above — the appeal courts, Hollis observed grimly, where causes go to grow old respectably. The second was a wire from Prosser, timed eleven at night and costing more than his week's wage: *NIGHT GANGS ON THE TRAMWAY AT THE SLACK. TIMBER GOING IN BY THE BOATLOAD. THEY ARE NOT SLOWING, YOUR HONOUR. THEY ARE CHOOSING.* That evening the delegation found the coffee-house in Great Turnstile fuller than Parliament had made it, because the tenants' winter lodgings had filled with friends of friends come up to hear the result; and Gillingwater, who had sat below the gangway through both weeks with his hat square on his knees like a man at a funeral he approved of, gave the room its marching orders in one sentence before they dispersed to the night coaches. "We have heard the law say our water may be somebody else's if she keeps quiet enough," he told them. "She has never once kept quiet in eighty years of books. Go home and tell your lanes so, and mind your buckets, and if any gentleman asks what the parish intends — the parish intends to keep counting." ---