第31章 The Railway Men

The railway men came in the spring of 1837, two years after the line had opened, and they came with flags and measuring rods and the confident air of men who had been told by Westminster that their cause was righteous. They set up their camp on the poor land to the east, the land that no one had wanted and that Leo had refused to sell because it was the only ground in the valley where the water drained freely, and they put their stakes into the earth with the care of surveyors who knew that a misplaced mark could cost a man his livelihood. Arthur Pemberton watched them from the manor window and felt the old tension rise in his chest—the same tension he had felt two years earlier when the first surveyors had come with their stakes and their flags, the same tension he had felt in the committee room when Marbury had spoken of sentimentality as a poor substitute for engineering. He had thought that the amendments had settled the matter, that the rerouted line and the compensated families and the endowed schoolroom had bought the valley a peace it could enjoy. He had been wrong. He found himself walking down to the camp before breakfast, his coat buttoned against the damp morning, his hat pulled low. The surveyors were a different sort from the last — younger, louder, less careful about who they deceived and more careful about what their superiors knew. Their lead man, one Mr. Huxtable, was a thick-set gentleman with a moustache like a brush and a manner that suggested he had never once in his life been told no. He looked at Arthur with the eyes of a man looking at a fence he intended to climb. "Lord Pemberton," he said, not bothering to rise. "A pleasure. I take it you are here to discuss the new alignment?" "I am here to observe," Arthur said. "And to remind you that the amended bill of 1836 specified the eastern route through the poor land. You are standing on the poor land." "Ah," Huxtable said, and he smiled the smile of a man who had heard this argument before and had prepared a better one. "But the poor land has become useful land, my lord. The drainage works you so admired have transformed it. What was heath is now pasture. What was marsh is now meadow. The line could run through this ground without the flooding issues of the original route, and the gradients are more favourable." "The original route was chosen to spare a village," Arthur said. "And a schoolhouse. And the common, where three hundred people keep their geese and their wash and their children." Huxtable's smile did not change. "I understand your feelings, my lord. But the company is under pressure from its shareholders. The original line was too costly to construct through the eastern ridge — the tunnelling alone would have exhausted the budget. The new alignment saves the company three thousand pounds, and those savings can be directed toward the compensation payments, which, I might add, have been delayed for eight months owing to the very difficulties you have described." Arthur felt the trap closing around him with the precision of a well-made snare. The delay in compensation was real. The tenants had been patient, but patience had its limits, and Mr. Protheroe — the straw man who had bought the smallholdings in the old scheme — was pressing them with notices even now, demanding payment for land they had never received. Huxtable was not asking for permission to build on the eastern ridge. He was asking Arthur to accept that the original agreement was broken, that the village must move again, that the schoolhouse must be sacrificed a second time. "We had an agreement," Arthur said quietly. "We had a bill," Huxtable corrected. "And the bill has been amended. The question is not what was agreed between private men, but what serves the public interest. The railway carries the mail, my lord. It carries the wounded from the factories. It carries the grain from the Midlands to the ports. The public interest is not served by a line that stays where it is convenient for a single family, however worthy that family may be." Arthur looked past him, at the stakes driven into the earth, at the flags snapping in the wind, at the other surveyors who had gone back to their instruments and were pretending not to listen. He thought of Thomas Hartley, who had taught him that a case was won not in the flourish of a closing speech but in the patient gathering of truth. He thought of Leo, who had watched the surveyors come and go over twenty years and had never once lost his balance. "The public interest," Arthur said slowly, "is not a single thing. It is many things, and they often conflict. The mail can be carried on a different route. The wounded can be carried on the present one if it is made safe. The grain can wait. But the village cannot move again, and the school cannot be lost, and the common cannot be fenced. These are not sentiment. They are fact." Huxtable sighed, the sigh of a man who had expected more resistance and was disappointed to find less. "Then you will oppose the new alignment in committee?" "I will oppose it wherever it needs to be opposed," Arthur said. "And I will not do it alone." The morning after Huxtable's visit, Arthur woke early and walked the valley before breakfast. The rain had returned overnight, falling in a fine, persistent drizzle that turned the earth to mud and the roads to rivers. He walked the old lane that ran behind the village, the one the surveyors had marked for demolition, and he counted the houses they would have to leave behind if the new alignment passed — twelve in all, each one occupied by a family that had lived in the valley longer than the railway had existed. He stopped at each doorstep and knocked, and each time someone opened the door and found Arthur Pemberton standing on their threshold, and each time they invited him in for tea, and each time he sat and listened to their fears and their hopes and their promises to fight. By the time he reached the last house — the cottage of old Mrs. Gillingham, who had lived in the valley for eighty-four years and had never once in her life left it — the sun was breaking through the clouds and the rain had stopped. Mrs. Gillingham poured him tea with hands that shook only slightly, and she told him about her husband, who had died digging the foundation of the schoolhouse, and about her son, who worked on the railway and sent money home every month, and about her granddaughter, who was studying to be a teacher at the Academy. "She'll teach where I taught," Mrs. Gillingham said, her eyes bright behind her spectacles. "And her children will teach where she taught. That's the way of things, isn't it, my lord? You plant a seed, and you hope it grows, and you trust that someone else will water it when you're gone." Arthur drank his tea and nodded, and he understood that the battle was not about land or lines or bills passed in Westminster. It was about Mrs. Gillingham's granddaughter, and her children, and the children's children, and the long chain of lives that stretched from the past into the future, each one depending on the one before it to plant the seed and water the growth. He finished his tea, thanked Mrs. Gillingham, and walked back to the manor with the weight of twelve families on his shoulders and the certainty that he would not let them fall.