Chapter 89 The Day of Asking

The first clear day did not come for a week, and when it came it came hard and blue, with the wind off the Combe cold enough to ring and the whole headland standing up out of the sea-light like something that had forgotten how much of itself was sky. The court came west in a procession of carriages that would have made a coronation proud and a campaign blush; Sir Charles Ampthorpe rode in the leading chaise with his officer and his silver pencil, wrapped to the eyes, examining the country through the window with the attention he had given the covenant. Behind him came the solicitors' coach, the witnesses' coach, the reporters' coach, and, doggedly at the rear, a hired landau containing Mr. Josiah Pike, whose surveyor and draughtsman had ridden, at their own request, on the box, as if proximity might soften what they were being paid to adjudge. At the foot of the track they all walked, the Vice-Chancellor included, because the court's officer announced the last mile impracticable for wheels and Sir Charles, who had not walked a mile since Michaelmas, announced that he had heard of such things and meant, at seventy-one, to attempt one. He went up between the keepers without requiring their help, and at the head of the hill he stopped, and took off his hat in the wind, and stood a long while looking at the ruin — the broken arch, the fallen wall, the niche with its two lamps burning in the daylight, the sea gray as iron below — and said, into the enormous quiet, "I have judged a great many forced metaphors in my time. I was not expecting the ground itself." The examination was unspooled in the open, because a view is a trial conducted by walking. They began at the lintel, where the six words stood carved in two hands, and Violet set the sisters' charter against them while the surveyor, who had come prepared with calipers and a ledger of his own, measured stone and lettering with a face that grew quieter and quieter. She took him through the punch-holes in the collar of the old brass lamp that sat now in the niche — six marks, the same two hands — and set the receipt from the carrier's lantern beside them; and she read him the estate book's line, *outside the manor, outside the settlement, holden by no deed of the family nor of the crown*, and the steward's addition, *Let the lawyers read this and despair*, and asked the surveyor, with perfect courtesy, whether he wished to date the lichen as well, or whether the lichen might date itself. The draughtsman's sketchbook, produced by the officer, contained by then a very accurate drawing of a chapel and a very small margin for doubt. Pike's counsel fought the ground yard by yard, and the ground answered him. The officer measured the niche and found it cut to the span of the ancient lamp that stood within it, and to no lamp that had been made within three centuries. The lintel's weathering ran as deep as the stones around it and no deeper, and the letters of the phrase had been worn at their lower edges by two hundred years of rain at that altitude, and not one fresh mark showed anywhere in the carving's deepest strokes. The surveyor, when the question was put directly to him at last, removed his hat and said, in a voice that carried the whole hill, "My lord, I am paid to date stones. This stone dates itself. I will not go home and swear otherwise, because I have children who would outlive my oath." Old Mr. Pike, at the edge of the ruin, heard it, and stood very still, and was heard by no one to say anything at all. The law was walking toward its verdict, and the last witness of the view was called by the Vice-Chancellor himself. He asked the girl to light the lamp of the shrine as it was lit in ordinary keeping, and Merryn went up to the niche without ceremony, and trimmed the wick of the old brass lamp that had come out of the water, and bowed a flame across from her own lantern, and the wick caught and stood, and the girl stepped back with the phrase of the lintel throwing its six words in gold up across the ruin's sky. Sir Charles watched it a long moment, and then he brought the court's record to an end with the plainest sentence he had uttered in forty years of them: "The stone is genuine. The hands are the hands of the charter. The ground lies outside the parchment the claimant purchased. I shall hear argument on the covenant tomorrow, but this court has seen its title in the stone." And the parties stood in the wind in their black coats while the officer entered the view, and it was then that Rosalind, watching the tide-line as she had been taught to watch it, saw the light ride the last of the flooding water up the sand. It came the way it had always come, unhurried as a parish verger, a small round brightness at the height of a carried lantern, throwing no beam, illuminating nothing, walking the wet sand as if the sand had been its road since the year turned — and it crossed the strand, and passed within a bowshot of the whole assembled court, and came to the chapel, and mounted, by no stair that anyone could see, to the niche where the two lamps burned. And there it rested a moment at the edge of the stone, and the girl's lantern leaned out to it, and the flame stepped. The light that had walked from the water passed into the lamp that burned nothing, and the walking thing was gone, and there was nothing left on the headland but the sea, and the wind, and the six words of gold, and a court of England standing silent in the presence of the evidence it had come so far to see. Sir Charles Ampthorpe looked at the place where the light had stood, and at the girl, and at the lamp on the niche's lip, and said, when he could speak, in a voice that had gone strange on him — "I have tried documents," he said, "conveyances, boundaries, inheritances. I have never once tried a covenant that kept itself. I am not sure the law has a box for this." And the relief of a long-held breath ran through the company like wind through a sail. Argument was heard on the hill that evening in the Salters' Arms, by the fire, because the law must put its conclusions in order even when the ground has already reached them. The deed of November 1781 was found genuine and, being genuine, was found to have discharged only the rights it could touch; the chapel ground at Greycombe lay outside the manor and outside the settlement, holden by the sisters' charter and by no deed of any Thorne, and the covenant stood entire upon it, answered in ink by the confession and answered in fire by the station itself. The claim of the heirs male failed with the deed's reach. The assignee Mr. Pike took nothing, and costs, and the loss of a commission of surveyor's fees he would rather not have incurred. And Lord Philip Vane, being asked by the Vice-Chancellor whether he maintained any claim in his own right, rose in the inn's best room with the firelight on his face and said, "My lord, my family's claim was a debt I mistook for an inheritance. I have seen what the property is worth, and I find I would rather be quit of the accounting." He signed the discontinuance on the table there, before the fire, with the girl's lamp alight at the end of the board like a third witness, and was seen, by those who looked, to sign without reading, which the office of the court had never before observed in him. The court went south in the morning under a sky going gray again, and Sir Charles, at the door of his chaise, looked back once at the chapel on the headland, and said to Barrow, with the silver pencil in his hand, "Tell your clients, Mr. Barrow, that the law has this day been taught a form of title it will not find in the books, and that I am not sorry for it." Then he got in, and the procession rolled away, and the keepers stood on the headland in its wake with the two lamps burning in the niche behind them, and the girl finished her first week as keeper of the shrine of the phrase, and the tide below the chapel, at the exact hour of slack water, did not so much ebb as subside, like a long argument that had reached its settlement and was done with the telling.