Chapter 87 The Hireling's Paper

The Salters' Arms received them on the second night as it had received them on the outward road, with the same landlord, the same goose, and the same fiddle, which argued that the north-west kept its winters in good order. What it added on this return was a courier: a boy from Barrow's chambers, blown in at dusk with a despatch oilskinned against the damp and franked enough to have carried a small fleet. Barrow's letter was longer than his habit and angrier than his letters had ever been. Mr. Pike of Cornhill had perfected his position while they rode the moors. The deed of November 1781 stood as they had guessed; Dr. Nettleton, an examiner of inks engaged by the scrivener, had sworn a preliminary report that the parchment, the hand, and the setting of the seal were all of the period claimed. That part was theater, Barrow wrote; the reveal followed. Pike did not mean to rest on the deed alone. His counsel had given notice that the whole apparatus at Greycombe — lintel, niche, the very holding of the ground — would be presented to the court as a device of modern construction, a shrine raised by women to lend poetry to a doubtful tenure. He had engaged a draughtsman to measure the chapel and a surveyor to date the stonework, and he meant to argue that the carving upon the lintel had been cut within the present generation. It was Violet who answered the despatch, sitting by the fire with the letter flat before her and the confession and charter opened beside it. "Let him date the stone," she said. "The lichen has been dating itself for two centuries, and no surveyor's rule can out-argue a still. The two hands on that lintel are the two hands on this charter, and no draughtsman alive can date a pair of hands." She looked up with the eyes she used for maps. "The trouble with hirelings, Mrs. Merrick, is that they are hired. The day Mr. Pike's surveyor stands on that headland and reads that lintel aloud, he will know within a breath that he has been paid to measure a lie the stone refuses to tell." Ines took the girl into the farthest corner of the inn's kitchen that night and taught her the door-verse, then the window-verse, then the long sea-phrase, six notes folding back like water over shingle, until the girl carried the whole tune and could walk it through all five stations without once hunting for the note. The landlord's grandchildren came to listen on the stair without being invited, and by the fourth repetition the smallest was humming it wrong in the second phrase, which Ines pronounced the customary price of all good singing. "Settle for it," she said. "A tune travels without luggage. Two hundred years ago mine crossed an ocean inside rope-skipping games. Yours will cross a courtroom inside a girl who owns nothing, and no one will think to confiscate her voice." They rode on through weather that made the going honest: a ferry over a river swollen with meltwater, a hill pass where Thomas walked ahead of the horses with a lantern in each hand and the wind reading the drifts aloud in sentences of snow, a night under canvas in a barn belonging to a woman who fed them oatcakes and asked no questions and was given three in return. On the fourth evening, with London two days distant, the girl asked Julian, out of a clear sky, what the sea would do to a lamp that had been carried by a girl for a month and a fortnight and then handed on. He answered in his sailor's economy: "The sea does not care who carries, only that it is carried. You carry it still. That is all the sea ever audits." And once, at the third inn, when the rest were asleep and the fire had burned to its red heart, Rosalind found Julian standing at the window with the traveling lamp leaning on the sill between him and the dark, and asked him, with her chin on his shoulder, whether he was mourning the command at Plymouth. He turned his head just enough to speak into her hair. "Mourning implies it was mine to keep. I have my command, wife. It gives its orders in code, it is anchored off a headland, and it has not once asked me to sail beyond the view of that roof." He lifted the lamp a little, so its small flame stood between them and the window. "Every man at sea carries a lamp he answers to. You have simply made mine impossible to answer by halves." Aunt Chloe met them at the door of Gower Street in the blue dusk with lamps in every window and shawls for the thin-blooded, having somehow learned their hour and their party before they had learned it themselves. She took one look at the girl standing among the luggage with her lantern and said, "Fourteen, wet, and ruder than the post, if I know my keepers — bed and a full plate, in that order," and had her inside before ceremony could be overtaken by weather. On the hall table, at which the whole household presently crowded, the girl set the lantern that burned nothing; and its light, which had thrown the six words of the lintel across a broken roof on a headland, threw them now across the plaster ceiling of a Bloomsbury house, in the same letters of gold, in the same two hands, as if the shrine had folded itself into the luggage. Chloe stood under them, reading, and went very still. "My sister spent her life in houses where words were used to keep people out," she said at last, quietly. "She would have liked these. They only ever let people in." She looked up at the letters of gold. "What are they, exactly?" "The arrival," said Rosalind. "The whole case in six words, carved by two sisters who never went to law about anything. Tomorrow morning we take that language to Westminster and let the law ask it how old it is." Later, in the blue dark before the sitting, Rosalind kept the hour in Chloe's drawing room with the girl's lantern on the sill between her and the sleeping city, and wrote the watch report in the commonplace book by its light, on the line where the family had always entered its watches: *Twelfth Day, return of the keepers to town. The station at Greycombe is lit, its keeper found, its lamp received from the water. Hilary sits tomorrow. The story has carried its papers. We carry the station's tongue.* And beneath it, at the foot of the page, in a hand that was not hers, stood six words in gold — the phrase, entered at last, whole, as if the lamp itself had judged the record complete and had seen no need to wait for the law's opinion. Rosalind read them twice, once for the words and once for the wonder that a dead shrine should have a fairer hand than any clerk, and closed the book on them, and slept the short sleep of a keeper before a sitting.