第27章 The Surveyors

The survey party arrived at Ashworth on a grey morning in early February, led by a man named Mr. Protheroe, the agent of the Midland and Western Railway Company. They were a dozen strong—engineers with theodolites and chains, labourers with stakes and hammers, and a clerk who recorded every foot of ground in a leather book. They did not ask permission. The notice served upon the estate had given them the right to enter and survey, and they exercised it with the brisk confidence of men who had performed the same ceremony on a hundred other properties and had never once been refused. Leo met them at the edge of the water meadows. He was courteous, as he always was, and he was watchful in a way that the surveyors, accustomed to bullying or to bluster, did not quite know how to answer. Mr. Protheroe was a thin, neat man with a smile that had been polished by years of use. "My lord," he said, "I am here to tell you that the railway is coming, whether any single landowner wishes it or not. The bill will go before Parliament this spring, and it will pass. The only question is whether the Pemberton estate will be a friend of the railway or an obstacle in its path." Leo looked past him at the line of stakes that had already been driven across the meadow, and at the red flags that marked the course of the future line. They ran along the river, past the common where the village geese grazed, and straight toward the schoolhouse. "An obstacle," he said, "is a thing that must be moved. My tenants' fields are not things. The children who learn their letters in that schoolhouse are not things. When you have a surveyor's instrument that can measure what they are worth to the families who depend on them, Mr. Protheroe, come back and show it to me." Protheroe's smile did not waver, but his eyes narrowed. "The company is prepared to be generous, my lord. We will purchase the strip of land at a fair price, and we will compensate you for the inconvenience." "Then you may prepare to be generous elsewhere," Leo said, "for the land is not for sale." That evening, Leo found Arthur standing before the map of the estate in the library, tracing the red line of the proposed railway with his finger. The young man's face was troubled, and when he spoke, it was with a care that showed he had been turning the matter over for hours. "You refused them outright, Father," Arthur said. "I think you were wrong." Leo raised an eyebrow. "Explain." "The railway is the future," Arthur said. "Coal will come cheaper to the county, and our grain will reach the ports in a day instead of a week. Land beside a line will double in value within a generation. Every landlord in England will be courting the companies within ten years, and the ones who resisted will be the ones who are left behind." He looked up from the map. "I am not defending Mr. Protheroe. I am defending the railway. They are not the same thing." Leo listened without interrupting, and when Arthur had finished, he felt a strange mixture of pride and unease. There was sense in what his son said—more sense than he wanted to admit. But there was also a blindness in it, the blindness of youth to the cost that progress exacts from those who cannot afford it. "Every truth has its price," Leo said at last. "The railway will bring prosperity to some and ruin to others. My duty is to the three hundred families who till this land, and I will not sell their livelihoods for the sake of a faster journey to London. But I am not so old that I cannot learn, Arthur. Tell me what you would have me do." What Arthur proposed, over the following weeks, was a middle course. The estate would not oppose the principle of the railway, but it would oppose this line—this particular line, which had been drawn by engineers who had never once consulted the farmers whose land it would divide. It would petition Parliament to alter the route, and it would fight in committee for fair compensation if the route could not be changed. Catherine, who had listened to their debates with her quiet attention, gave the plan her blessing. "You are both right," she said, "which is why you must act together. Your father knows the land, and you know the future. Between you, you may yet find a way to keep both." The estate engaged a barrister, and Leo chose his man with care. Mr. Simon Blackwell was a young lawyer of Lincoln's Inn who held the chambers that had once belonged to Thomas Hartley, and who had been, in the barrister's final years, his pupil. He came down to Ashworth in March, a slight, earnest young man with ink-stained fingers and a memory for detail that reminded Leo painfully of his old friend. "I studied under Mr. Hartley for three years," Blackwell said, when Leo asked him why he had taken the brief. "He taught me that the law exists to protect the weak from the strong, and that a barrister who forgets that has forgotten his whole purpose. When I heard who was opposing this bill, I asked to be sent." The case was prepared through the spring, and it was during those weeks that the truth about Mr. Protheroe came to light. It was Blackwell who discovered it, through a clerk at the village inn who had noticed that the agent spent every visit closeted with a different tenant farmer, and that a good deal of money appeared to change hands. "He has been buying up the smallholdings along the line," Blackwell reported. "Through a straw man, so that the sales do not appear in the company's name. And he has offered two of your tenants a hundred pounds apiece to testify before the committee that the railway will be a blessing to the village." Leo read the list of names and felt the anger rise in him like a tide. But it was Arthur who spoke, and there was a coldness in his voice that Leo had never heard there before. "Then they have made it simple," Arthur said. "We will prove the bribery, and we will break the bill. And when it is done, Father, I intend to be the one who does it." Leo looked at his son—at the squared jaw, the steady grey eyes, the sudden, unaccustomed steel—and he thought of a young tightrope walker who had once told a London barrister that he did not shrink from challenges. He did not say what he was thinking. He only nodded, and hoped that the coming fight would not cost the boy what the law had cost him. ---