Chapter 88 After the Water Court

The valley did not celebrate the river court the way it had celebrated the earlier verdicts, with the bells and the bonfires and the long tables in the lanes, because the men and women who had kept the water through the forty years of the false deeds had never once believed the thing was really theirs to lose, and being proved right after four decades is a quieter joy than being saved, and Gillingwater, asked by the younger men to ring the change, said he would not ring the free-water change for a victory but would ring it, as he had always rung it, for the water itself, which had not changed its nature to oblige the court. Arthur went down to the sea-cock alone the first morning after, the way he had once gone down the mine road to meet the water's turning, and the gate stood as it had stood for generations, open and quiet and letting the fresh run out to the salt, and he understood that his father's sin had not been the hiding of a book but the believing, at the end, that the gate was a thing that could be owned and so could be sold, and that the covenant his own hand had now laid before the world was only the written shape of what the valley had always known, that a gate is a trust and not a title, that the keeping is the thing and the thing cannot be inherited, only received. Fenwick, whose pleasure in the case had been the plain pleasure of a careful man handed the one clean fact in a long war of facts, drew up the settlement the court could not refuse, that the gate and the shore about it be entered not in the Pemberton books but in the parish's own roll, kept in the church where any man could read it, so that no future earl could take the water's keeping away from the people who kept it, and Arthur signed it with a hand that did not shake because the price had finally been paid and a paid price steadies the pulse, and Eleanor at his shoulder put nothing into the bargain but her own name on the witness line, which was the whole of the point, that the house and its gate belonged now, honestly, to everyone who came to the wall to draw water. Devereux finished his undoing and sent the ruined survey to Verrall under his own cover with a letter of one line, that a man who draws a line to serve a lie has signed it with the hand that must live afterward with what it drew, and the company, its title to the foreshore now shown to rest on the very gate it had spent its fortune to break, did not reply, and Verrall, the chairman, withdrew quietly from a fight he had, on the ground he himself had mapped, forfeited, and the valley, which had learned patience from its own water, was content to let the silence stand for a surrender. The book went back where it had been meant to rest, not into the Pemberton strongroom but into the church chest with the parish roll and the covenant and the matched halves of the old deeds, and the empty place in the sewing, the gap where his father's name had been cut out and Arthur's had not yet been written, was left as it stood, a visible wound in the leaf, because Arthur would not have it repaired, would have the book keep the scar of the forty years, and Hollis, the old solicitor who had carried the family's papers through both the earlier suits and this one, told him it was the one act of vanity he had ever permitted himself, and Arthur said no, it was the one act of memory, and the two men stood over the chest a while without another word about what a house owes the days it has tried to forget. The first word, which is what the valley had come to call the covenant's opening line, was not, in the end, a legal word at all, and the boy Thomas, the water-lad who read to old Vane at the seal, discovered it one winter when he went down with a lamp to trace the cut letters in the stone of the gate, that the whole long instrument began not with the family's name nor the earldom nor the price of the price, but with the plainest sentence any keeping can be made of, that whoever stands at this gate keeps the water free for all who come to it in need, and that the Pemberton line was named in the charter only as the servants of that sentence, liable to be turned out of it like any faithless keeper, which was how the family had come, through a hundred years of thinking itself the owner, to be, in the honest reading, the valley's own hired hand, and Arthur, hearing the lad read the words aloud in the dripping dark of the gate-house, laughed once, dryly, at how long it had taken a house to learn the shape of its own service, and felt, for the first time since he was seventeen and had kept his silence in the study, that the price was not only paid but understood. So the valley kept its water free into the new year, and the gate stood open and the fresh ran out to the salt unhindered and unmapped by any company's greedy survey, and the ledger with its honest scar lay in the church chest where any man could read that a title is only a trust that has forgotten itself, and Arthur walked the shore road at the turn of the seasons with the lad Thomas reading ahead of him and the sound of the sea-cock under the wall a steady pulse, and knew that the price of his father's book had been paid in full by the one thing his father had never been able to do, which was to set the truth of the matter down where the light could reach it and let it belong, at last, to everyone.