第42章 The Committee Room

The bill came before a committee of the Commons in the second week of November, and it was everything that Devereux had promised and rather more. It empowered the North Wessex and Vale Railway Company to take by compulsory purchase a strip of the lower valley three hundred yards wide, to enter upon the land without further notice, and to require the owner to show cause against the taking within thirty days. It was, by the standards of the railway age, an ordinary instrument of progress. It was, by the standards of the men who had drafted it, a masterpiece — for the valuation upon which the purchase was to proceed had been fixed, in a schedule attached to the bill, at a figure that Arthur's agent calculated to be less than a third of the meadows' true worth. The committee sat in a low-ceilinged room off the main corridor of the Commons, a room whose windows gave onto a yard where coal carts came and went all day, so that the members heard their proceedings through a constant thin rain of grit and dust. Arthur had been allowed to attend as a party whose land was in question, and he sat behind the bar of the committee with Mr. Hargreaves at his side, the nervous solicitor having taken the case on again at a fee that Arthur suspected had emptied the Academy's contingency fund. Across the room, in the places reserved for those in favour of the bill, sat three directors of the company, a clerk with a stack of ledgers, and a counsel whom Arthur recognised with a chill of recognition: the same tall, imposing barrister who had destroyed their habeas corpus petition in the spring. "The honourable members will note," the counsel said, pacing before the chairman of the committee with the ease of a man who owned the room, "that the line in question has already been surveyed, at the company's expense, and that the lands to be taken are water meadows of marginal agricultural value — lands that in a season of average rain lie under water for half the year, lands that can neither be built upon nor ploughed with confidence. The company asks for a narrow strip of such ground in order to carry a highway of iron through the vale, for the benefit of the commerce of three counties and the comfort of some forty thousand souls." "Marginal," Arthur murmured to Hargreaves, under his breath. "Tell the committee what the schedule values the meadows at, Mr. Hargreaves." The solicitor rose, cleared his throat, and addressed the chairman with the same trembling deference he had brought to Westminster in the spring. "The lands in question, sir, are not marginal. They carry two hundred and fourteen head of cattle in a dry summer, they feed the whole of the lower village through the winter, and they have been farmed continuously for over a century. The valuation in the company's schedule is an insult to the market, and I have here — if the committee will permit — the sworn valuations of two independent land agents, neither of whom has any interest in the estate, valuing the strip at not less than four times the sum proposed." The counsel did not trouble to look at the documents. He had been in this room before, Arthur realised, many times, and he knew its weather. "My learned friend's valuations," he said, "are the valuations of men who are paid to value. The company's schedule was settled by the board of trade. I am confident that the committee will attach rather more weight to the board's figures than to the arithmetic of two gentlemen of the shire whose livings depend upon the goodwill of a noble patron." The committee sat back. The chairman of the committee, a grey, patient man named Sir Percy Marlowe who had sat through a thousand such bills, folded his hands and looked at Arthur without quite looking at him. "The honourable earl has been heard," he said. "Does the earl wish to add anything to his agent's remarks?" Arthur stood. He had not intended to speak. He had prepared a speech — a careful, legal, temperate speech — and he had left it in his room at the inn, weighed down by the knowledge that he was walking into a room full of men who had heard every argument that could be made against the taking of land, and who had found most of them wanting. He had nothing, in that moment, but the truth he had carried up from Lombard Street. "I wish to tell the committee," he said, "why this bill is not about a strip of water meadow. The company has told you that it needs the land for its line. I have here — and I will leave it with the chairman — a memorandum, dated four years ago, drawn up between a banking house in Lombard Street and the chairman of this railway, which sets out the true object of the widening. It is not the line. It is the coal." He heard the room change. The committee members who had been nodding through the counsel's opening paragraphs stopped nodding. Sir Percy Marlowe took off his spectacles and polished them, which Arthur had been told, by men who knew the committee's habits, was what Sir Percy did when he was no longer certain which way the wind lay. "The memorandum," Arthur said, "provides for the acquisition of the mineral rights beneath the lower valley, to be purchased through the railway as a matter of convenience and concealment, and to be transferred thereafter to a syndicate named in the document. The company has never published this memorandum. It has never mentioned coal to this committee, to the board of trade, or to the shareholders whose money it means to spend. It has presented the compulsory purchase of my tenants' fields as an act of public necessity, when it is in truth a private purchase of a mineral seam by men who could not obtain it by honest sale." The counsel was on his feet. "The earl produces a private memorandum of commercial discussion —" "Which I will lay before the committee," Arthur said, "with the name of the banking house, and the names of the parties, and the authority of Sir Julian Pemberton, late of the Inner Temple, under whose direction the copy was made. If the committee wishes, I will call the clerk who witnessed it." There was a long silence. Arthur stood in it, and he did not look at the counsel, and he did not look at the directors, and he did not look at the members. He looked at the coal carts passing in the yard, and he thought of the valley — the green meadows, the cattle, the children of the Academy on the hill — and he understood that he had just played the only card he had, and that the game had changed from a question of law into a question of trust. Sir Percy Marlowe put his spectacles back on. "The committee," he said slowly, "will adjourn to consider the material placed before it. The earl's memorandum will be retained in the committee's records, and the bill will not be reported until the committee has satisfied itself as to the accuracy of the earl's characterisation of the company's intentions. We are obliged to the earl for his candour." The room emptied. Hargreaves gathered his papers with trembling hands and followed Arthur out into the corridor, where the coal dust hung in the air and the gas lamps hissed along the walls. Arthur was halfway down the corridor when a young man in a clerk's coat stepped out of a doorway and fell into step beside him. "His lordship will forgive me," the young man said, "but I am clerk to Sir Percy, and Sir Percy desired me to say —" He glanced about, and lowered his voice. "Sir Percy bids your lordship be careful. The memorandum names a house in Lombard Street, and Lombard Street does not love being named. The chairman of this committee is not the last word on this bill, and the last word — whatever the committee reports — will be spoken in a room your lordship will not be shown into." Arthur studied the young man's face. It was a decent face, tired and honest, and Arthur believed him. "Thank you," he said. "Tell Sir Percy that the valley does not forget a kindness." The clerk was gone. Arthur walked out into the November evening, the gaslight pooling on the wet stones, and he had not gone a hundred yards before a hand fell on his shoulder. It was Vine, the clerk from Julian's chambers, and his face was white. "My lord — you must come with me, at once. The memorandum you left with the committee — I know, I copied it myself, I know its every line — and I have just been told that the original is gone from the letter-case. The case was taken from my room at the inn this afternoon, while I was at the printers. Nothing else was touched. Only the paper that names Lombard Street." Arthur stood very still in the falling dusk, the city roaring around him, and he understood that Sir Percy's warning had been delivered not an hour too soon. "Then the committee has my copy," he said slowly, "and Lombard Street has its answer. The question is which of us is believed. Come — there is a coach stand at the corner, and there is a man in a bank in Lombard Street who is about to learn that he is not the only man in London who keeps a ledger." ---