Chapter 84 The Identity of Waters

The hearing came on before the Master of the Rolls in the first week of December, in a chamber colder than the shilling that hired it, and the vale's people stood along the wall as they had stood at every judgment of the war, hats in hand, saying nothing; and the petitioner sat at the bar in a plain dark coat, composed, with the Calais register on the rail before him and the Union's junior counsel beside him, while Prendergast himself, Hollis noted, sat in the body of the court like a man watching a clock he has wound. The Junior opened with the petition's argument — that identity is the hinge of inheritance, that a ceremony twice performed is a ceremony once void, that a title cannot stand upon a paper the possessor dare not submit to the light — and the Rolls listened with the immovable attention of a man who has heard every shape of this argument in fifty years, and then said only: "Proceed to the evidence, Mr. Junior, for the identity of a person is a question of fact, and facts are sworn." They swore them. The parish register of Ashworth came first, in the rector's own hand, and the entry of the ninth Earl's birth stood there in the ink of the year, with the father's name and the mother's and the witnesses of the christening, three names of the vale that were in their graves and could no longer be frightened. The Yorkshire marriage followed, not in copy now but in the register itself, brought down by the curate of the upland parish at Hollis's expense — the entry of two names, a rider's woman and a younger son, witnessed by a schoolmaster and a widow, with the parish's corroboration in the margin, and a seal that the Rolls turned to the light himself. Then came the troupe's own record, the ledgers of a travelling show, produced by Marie in her capacity as keeper of her grandfather's papers, in which the boy's birth and the girl's death were entered in a commercial hand with no romance in it whatever — the register of employment, the same ledgers that had paid the riders and the grooms, confirming by arithmetic what the church confirmed by ceremony: that the two ceremonies of the allegation could not stand together in any year, because the groom of one was provably in the other, under the tent, on the dates the Calais paper had him married in France. The watermark killed what the registers had buried. Devereux, sworn in his own person and his own danger, examined the Calais board by the window-light and put his finger on the sheet: a fleur-de-lis in a circle, with a date in the chain-line beneath it, and the date was 1840, which made the paper younger than the ceremony it recorded by a generation of thirty years. He said it flatly, and the petition's junior, having looked, had nothing to say; and the Rolls, having looked, said less, and wrote upon his notes. The petitioner himself was put into the box then, and Hollis walked him through the ten questions a pedigree answers in its sleep — the colour of his alleged father's eyes, the church of his alleged parents' ceremony, the names of the servants who had stood sponsor in his absence — and each answer came a beat too late and a degree too vague; and at the seventh question, Hartwell rose from the body of the court, grey and deliberate, and said to the Rolls that he had been for twenty years in Sir Julian Pemberton's service and at his deathbed at the last, and that his master had neither wife nor child, and had said so himself upon his death-bed in a sentence Hartwell would repeat to the court because it had never been written down and yet had never left him: "I leave nothing, and nothing leaves me." The dead false heir, through the mouth of the man who had guarded him, closed the case better than any living witness could have closed it; and the Rolls, setting down his pen, observed that the court was asked to set aside the legitimacy of a line that the courts had already adjudged, upon a paper younger than the recollection of the persons it purported to bind, sworn to by a claimant who could not describe his own father's eyes. And then Fenwick, who had been waiting in the body of the court with a fish-basket under his coat, asked leave, and spread upon the rail the third plate of the winter: a dish of crystallised residue from the pool at the foot of the sea-cock, beside the ring-water's dish and the Slack's yielding dish, and invited the Rolls, as he had once invited the magistrate of the county town, to try the three with a clean glass rod; and the Rolls did, gravely, twice, and wrote in his notes the sentence the vale afterwards pasted under the porch roof: *The identity of the waters is sworn and tasted, and the identity of the claimant is sworn and wanting. The petitions stand dismissed with costs and the undertaking in damages.* The petitioner stood to speak, and the Rolls looked at him over the rims of his spectacles, and said, in the tone the county town remembered, that the court would also commit the question of the register's provenance to the proper officers, and that a gentleman who had paid by the quarter for a pedigree might find the quarter-day answered before the term was out. They came out into the December dusk with the costs awarded and the vale's people walking behind them in silent good order, and Hollis, at the doorway, was handed a note from a clerk that he read twice, once to himself and once to the party. The note reported that a second entry had been made at the manor during the sitting: the far window again unlatched, nothing taken, but the duplicate Watch-book's page for the thirteenth night of October — the night of the opening of the arch — gone out of the volume entire, cut from the sewing with a thin blade, leaving the silk ends in the binding. Hollis showed the page's absence to the party without words, and Arthur, turning the book in his hands, said what all of them were thinking: "They have not come to steal our proof, gentlemen. They have come to take our clock. Whoever reads our books for strangers has now begun to write in them." And he gave the book to Eleanor to carry home against her breast, the way she carried the estate's accounts on quarter-days, and added, with a quietness that silenced the street: "We shall answer the paper in London, and we shall find the hand in the vale. Both." ---