Chapter 81 The Answering

They rode the frost off the high road with the vale already lit for them, shaft-head answering shaft-head along the drove way in a chain of lamps that looked from the high ground like a muster-roll burning, so that the party came home out of the dark into a valley drawn in fire; and Catherine stood at the gate with the chalk from her apron and struck the square of the thirteenth day clean through the middle, and handed Arthur the driving-bar as he swung down out of the saddle — being of the opinion, she said, that the one iron his grandfather had set to the water's face ought to be present at the answering of a door — and gave them oilskins, and the halves of a loaf cut against the night, and the double Watch-book wrapped in tarred canvas, and a boy with four fresh horses led out and already saddled, because the ladders were lit but the water would not wait upon ceremony. They came to the northern intake beneath the scarp a little before midnight, and went down by the driven shaft in parties of two upon the ladder, Prosser first with the bull's-eye lamp, because no man in England knew that hill from the inside better than a collier's son who had walked the Union's level by candlelight while the Union supposed it was paying him; then Trevanion with his flannel bundle and his cold chisels, then Fenwick with the watch and the chalk, then Arthur with the bar, and Devereux between two lamps, and Gillingwater last upon the bell-line so that the vale above should not be deaf to them underground. The water met them at the first landing as a lack: the foot-crawl they had known all autumn, the shin-deep walking that had answered their weir boards on schedule, was gone out of the eastern limb, and the brick under their boots was dry to the treading, and the air where the water should have breathed lay still. Prosser knelt and laid a palm flat to the floor of the course and held it there through a long count, then rose with a face that had gone spare. "She has left the near bore altogether, your honour. There is not a hand's breadth of damp in it. She is all of herself, walking yonder." They went on north along the course in the dry at a pace none of them had ever matched wet, and the door found them rather than they it: an arch of the ancient brick, closed flush with the breast of the working, keyed from the near side, and set into the crown of it a plate of gunmetal carrying three signs — the Pemberton lion, a mason's mark like a bent key, and a row of tally-strokes with a date beneath that the lamplight took a moment to resolve. Trevanion read the signs aloud as he held his lamp to the plate: the lion was the earl's, the key-mark was the Tregarthen stamp that had walled every wet work in the county for a hundred years, and the date, he said, was 1752, which made the arch older than any title in the dispute and every bit as old as its quarrels. "This is the bound," he said quietly. "This side is the vale's, by every deed we hold. What stands beyond was never beggared by a surveyor's pen, because no surveyor ever heard of it. My grandfathers' record says the works ran on beyond the line the parish forgot. They ran on." They did not knock. Arthur set the flat of the driving-bar to the brick, once, the way a man lays a hand on a horse's shoulder before he speaks, and said, low, to the stones or to whatever kept behind them — and no man of the party could afterwards have sworn which — "We are come, and we are answered for." Then Trevanion and the boy unkeyed the arch from the near side with bar and cold chisel, taking the bricks out by the old courses and passing them back one by one to be stacked, and in the instant the last brick came free the air of the far works arrived at their faces — warm, still, faintly salt, older than the brick that had stood against it — and the knocking that had filled the hill for a fortnight stopped dead, and for one full breath there was no sound in the world but their own boots ringing on the setts. Then, from somewhere beyond the black of the opened mouth, the water answered them as she had answered every door her road had ever crossed: the pulse came back into the ground under their feet, one stroke, then a second, then the count, five to the minute and gathering, and the first water rolled in over the sill of the ancient arch as though it had been waiting a lifetime for leave to enter its own house. They measured her upon the far floor before they did anything else, because Fenwick had sworn by the weir boards that no water of the vale should ever cross a threshold uncounted; and the entry went down under Devereux's eye — depth over the new sill, time with the watch, the fall to the first ring-stone, three trials, the figures entered on the spot before the ink could dry. Then, the water being at their thighs and rising, they worked their way back along the ledge to the ladder-foot, and it was Prosser, last of them up, who gave the news that changed the night: as he stood at the top of the wall with the lamp held out over the flood, the Union's hammers from the far side of the hill, which had ceased when the arch opened, began again — but one hammer only, slow and single, swinging at a long measure, and with every swing of it the count under the floor held steady at five, as if the two companies of the dark were keeping time with one another across the black water. They came up at two in the morning into a vale still burning from end to end, and the boy rode ahead with the figures to the porch while the rest stood at the shaft-head in the frost; and Arthur set the driving-bar across the ladder-way in the old manner, the flat to the iron as Vane had ruled the bar was always set while the water was being listened for. "We knocked once, gently, and she answered at five," he said. "And something on the far side of her has begun to knock back at long measure, in time with her walking. That is not an engine. Engines do not keep the count. Fill the fourteenth square tonight, Catherine, and send word to Hollis that the door is open and the water is through it — and whichever of us meets whom on the far side, we shall meet them at a time she has chosen, not one they have billed us for." Fenwick, kneeling by the lamp, wrote into the Watch-book the line that Prosser would not let him shorten, and the line read: *The arch of 1752 is open, and wet. She walks through it northward to the sea-road at a count of five. We are answering-men this night, not knocking-men. — R. F.* ---