第41章 The Chairman's Offer

The valley kept its harvest that autumn. The railway widened nothing, took nothing, and the deputies who had turned back at the edge of the lower fields were spoken of in the village taverns the way lost battles are spoken of — with a certain rueful pride, a certain wonder that so much had been risked and so little lost. The writs had been filed away. The compensation that had been offered, inadequate though it had been, was redistributed among the tenants whose water meadows would have drowned beneath the cutting, and the drains that Thomas Gillingwater had designed were dug by volunteers, and the lower valley lay green under the October rain as if it had never been in danger at all. Arthur knew better. He had stood in a courtroom and heard the law dismiss his people's home as a cost of commerce, and he had stood in a field and seen the law retreat before the weight of bodies and the pressure of conscience, and he knew that neither victory was permanent. England remembered nothing faster than its defeats forgiven. The railway company had lost face but not money, not influence, not friends in high places, and a man who has been made to look foolish in the shire does not forget it merely because the shire has. The letter arrived on the fifth of October, carried by a groom in the dark blue livery of the North Wessex and Vale Railway Company, and it bore the gold crest of a line that had grown, in four years, from a paper scheme into one of the most profitable railways in the west of England. It was courteously worded, and it was signed by the chairman himself. Silas Devereux presented his compliments to the Earl of Pemberton and begged the honour of waiting upon him at Ashworth Manor at his lordship's earliest convenience, upon a matter of mutual interest. "Mutual interest," Eleanor said, reading over Arthur's shoulder, her voice flat. "That is the phrase a man uses when he means to take something from you and has not yet decided how to dress the taking." "Or when he has decided and wants you to believe otherwise," Arthur said. "Send word that we are at home. And tell Marie to keep the Academy children close to the building for the next few days. I would rather they were not passing the drive when a chairman of the board is taught the manners he has come to learn." Devereux came on a Thursday, in a closed carriage of the sort that had never once been seen on the valley roads, drawn by two bays that had cost more than a tenant's year. He was a short, compact man of fifty, with iron-grey hair and the calm, patient eyes of a specialist in the management of arithmetic. He took off his gloves in the hall as if he owned it, and he accepted the cup of tea that Catherine poured him as if she were a servant whose face he meant to remember for the recommendation of her conduct. "I will not waste your lordship's time," he said, when the pleasantries had been disposed of, "nor my own. The company is prepared to pay three thousand pounds, cash, for the two water meadows that lie west of the cutting —" "They are not for sale," Arthur said. "— and a further two thousand," Devereux continued, as if Arthur had not spoken, "as a gift to the Academy, to be paid upon the signing of the deeds, in gratitude for the institution's service to the county." Eleanor set down her cup. "You are purchasing the fields and the goodwill in the same bargain, Mr. Devereux." "For a Sunday-school education the company has called a 'co-educational experiment,'" Devereux said, "two thousand pounds is a generous silence. I hope your lordship understands that it is silence we are buying, rather than the land. Consent has value. Pageantry of resistance does not." Arthur looked at the man across the width of his own library, and he felt the old cold settle into his chest — the cold that came before a fight, the cold that had carried him through the committee room and the hearing and the stand. "Mr. Devereux. My father gave this valley a school because the valley asked for one and a school was owed. He gave it a railway because you and your predecessors asked for the land and the land was given. Neither gift was bought, and neither will be sold now for the price of a cutting through water meadows that feed three hundred people. I am sorry to disappoint your arithmetic." Devereux did not frown. He did not raise his voice. He set his teacup down with the precision of a man closing a ledger at the end of a day's business, and he looked at Arthur with something that might have been respect if it had not been so plainly measured. "My lordship makes a handsome refusal," he said. "I have been refused by better men than earls, and I have generally found that the refusal costs them more than the bargain would have. The company will not come at your fields, my lord, with writs and bailiffs again. It has learned the taste of that medicine, and the shareholders have not. We will come at you instead through Parliament, with a bill empowering the line to take the water meadows by compulsory purchase upon an approved valuation, and with a clause — I ask your lordship's pardon for the legal jargon — that shall require the owners to show cause against the taking within thirty days." "Then we shall show cause," Arthur said. "We showed cause before. We shall show it again." "Your lordship stood on the ground last time. Parliament is not ground. It is paper — and paper will not be moved by song, however stirring the song may be." Devereux rose, and his voice, for the first time, carried a note of something beneath the courtesy, something that had been waiting in the arithmetic all along. "The valley has had its hour of glory, my lord. It has had its stand, its songs, its deputations to a court that did not listen. What it has not had is a night in which the company's men come, not to arrest, but to survey — and by the time the survey is paid for and the bill is passed, there will be nothing left of the lower fields worth refusing. I wish you a pleasant Michaelmas." He was at the door, his gloves drawn on, when Arthur spoke. "Mr. Devereux. You will find, when your bill is printed, that the county has a longer memory than the shareholders. We have stood against worse than arithmetic." Devereux turned. For a moment his expression was unguarded — and what Arthur saw in it was not anger, and not contempt, but the careful, patient satisfaction of a man who had just been shown the exact size of the thing he meant to break. "I rely on the arithmetic, my lord. It has never once let me down." The carriage had no sooner turned onto the London road than a second visitor arrived, on foot, and refused to give his name at the door until he had said that he came from the chambers of the late Sir Julian Pemberton. He was a thin young clerk with ink-stained fingers and a leather bag that he set down in the hall as if it contained something heavier than paper. His name was Mr. Vine, and he had come a long way, he said, because Sir Julian had left instructions that, upon the earl's refusing a certain offer, the letter-case in his bag was to be delivered. "Upon my refusing?" Arthur said. "He knew you would be called upon within the month, my lord." Vine opened the bag and drew out a flat case of scuffed black leather. "He said you would refuse whatever was offered — and that when you had, you would need to know the rest of it." Inside the case were papers: a memorandum in Sir Julian's cramped, precise hand, a copy of a letter from a banking house in Lombard Street, and a single sheet, folded four times, headed *Scheme for the Acquisition of Certain Mineral Rights in the Vale, the Parties Thereto Being Vane & Devereux*. Arthur read it twice, and then a third time, and when he looked up, Eleanor was watching him with the expression she wore when she could see that the ground beneath them had shifted and there was no point asking what had moved it. "Ashworth," he said slowly, "was never the prize." He held up the sheet. "There is coal under the lower valley. Devereux's railway was never about the cutting at all. The company means to buy the fields at forced sale, drive its line through the seam to make the purchase respectable, and then sell the mineral rights to a syndicate that has been waiting for the land since before my father took the title." His hand moved down the page, past the signatures, to a single name written in a different hand at the bottom of the scheme. "And behind Devereux — behind the whole of it, in Lombard Street, in the courts, in the committee rooms of Parliament — there is a man who tried once before, in my father's first year as earl, to buy the same rights for a sum that would have made Leo a rich man and a fool. He was refused then. He has waited twenty-three years. His name is Aldous Vane. ---