第26章 The Heir Apparent

In the autumn of 1833 Leo Pemberton stood on the crest of the eastern hills and looked down at the fields his tenants had brought in for the harvest. He was in his forty-ninth year, still strong and straight-backed, but there was grey at his temples and a certain tiredness in his eyes that came not from age alone but from the long memory of everything he had carried. Beside him stood his son Arthur, a young man of eighteen, whose silence and steadiness reminded Leo more each season of the portrait of the seventh earl above the library mantelpiece. The resemblance had always been there—the same dark hair, the same grey eyes, the same habit of studying a landscape as though it were a problem to be solved—but it had sharpened as Arthur had grown into manhood. Leo had postponed this moment for a year, and he knew it. He had told himself that Arthur was too young, that the weight of the estate was too heavy for a boy's shoulders, that there would be time enough once his schooling was finished. But the lesson of his own life was that time was never guaranteed. Thomas Hartley had not waited to act when the truth demanded it. Old Harrington had not waited to teach him the value of a day's honest work. A father who waited for the perfect moment to prepare his son would die with his lessons unspoken. "Your grandfather left me this land by accident of blood," Leo said, breaking the silence at last. "The law gave it to me by accident of proof. But the men who farm it give it to me fresh every year, through their labour and their trust. That is the only inheritance that truly matters, Arthur, and it is the one I mean to give you now." Arthur turned to face him, and Leo saw in his son's eyes the same doubt he himself had worn when a stranger in a Hertfordshire yard had first spoken to him of earls and birthrights. "I have read every volume you gave me, Father. I know the ledgers and the tenancy rolls and the history of the entail. But knowing a thing and doing a thing are not the same. When you were my age you had already walked a tightrope above a cage of lions." Leo smiled. "I had. And it taught me a single useful truth—that fear is a poor guide and a worse master. You have never walked a rope, Arthur, and you never need to. But you will meet your own cages, and you must decide whether to cross them or to stand at the edge staring down until your legs give out." There was a pause. Then Leo pointed to the river valley below, where two farms lay side by side upon the same stream. "There is your first lesson," he said. "John Varney and Abel Croft have quarrelled over the water since Michaelmas. Varney has raised his sluice, and Croft's lower meadows have run dry. Settle it, Arthur. Settle it so that both men can look each other in the eye at church on Sunday, and neither feels he has been robbed by his lord." Arthur looked at the two farms for a long moment, and then, without a word, he started down the hill. Leo let him go and followed at a distance, keeping to the hedgerow so that he would not be seen. It was dusk before Arthur returned. He found his father waiting by the stile at the bottom of the park, and he was wet to the knees from wading in the stream. "Well?" Leo asked. "I walked the ground first," Arthur said. "Varney's sluice is badly set—it takes more than his share and floods Croft's winter meadow into the bargain. I told them the estate would pay for a new sluice, set so that each man takes his water on alternate days, and that Varney would mend any flooding damage in the spring. They grumbled, and then they shook hands over it, and Croft gave me a cup of small beer." Leo studied his son's face in the fading light. "You listened," he said. "You walked the ground. You did not take sides until you understood the water. That is worth more than a dozen years of reading, Arthur. You have begun well." That evening, as the household sat down to dinner, the subject turned, as it often did, to Marie's latest undertaking. At sixteen, Marie Pemberton had her grandmother's quick tongue and her grandmother's courage, and she had announced that she intended to open a second schoolroom in the west wing of the village schoolhouse—a room set apart for the girls of the estate, where they might learn their letters as thoroughly as the boys. The vicar, who had never entirely reconciled himself to the school, objected that girls required only enough learning to read the scriptures and keep a household. Marie had answered him with a directness that made Catherine hide a smile behind her napkin. "My grandmother could read and write well enough to compose letters that changed the course of a family," she said. "Consider what she might have done if anyone had thought to teach her properly." Leo granted the schoolroom that same week, and the money for a second teacher, and he told Catherine afterwards that he had never been prouder of either of his children than on that single day. There was also a letter from abroad that autumn, addressed in a careful, foreign-trained hand. Julian Pemberton wrote from Florence, where he had settled at last, to say that he had married a respectable widow, that he kept a small vineyard and a modest house, and that he had seen an engraving of the young Mr. Pemberton of Ashworth in a London gazette. He hoped, he wrote, that the next earl would know the peace that he, Julian, had spent a lifetime learning to find. Leo read the letter twice, and then he placed it in the drawer of his desk beside the ring his father had given his mother, where he kept the things that mattered most. The autumn passed, and the harvest was good. And then, on the first truly cold evening of the year, a messenger arrived from London with a letter bearing the crest of Graves and Partners. Leo read it standing in the hall, his face changing as he read, and when he looked up, his eyes met Arthur's. "There is a railway company," he said slowly, "that has given notice of its intention to survey a line across our land. It will cross the water meadows, pass the village common, and run within thirty yards of the schoolhouse. They will be here within the month, with their stakes and their instruments and their promises." Arthur said nothing. But something in his face—a quickening, a kind of hunger—did not escape his father's notice, and Leo felt the first stirring of a presentiment that the coming year would test them all in ways neither of them could yet foresee. ---