第47章 The Petition

The petition of the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company was read in the House in the second week of May, and the notice of the intended bill was served upon the trustees of the estate with all the ceremony that the law required, and Arthur received it in the library with Hollis beside him, and he read it, and he laid it on the desk, and he understood that the war of paper had begun in earnest. The bill was a long document, and it was a masterpiece of the kind of drafting that makes a thing sound reasonable while it is being done. It recited the public benefit of branch railways. It recited the state of the coal measures in the county, the want of good roads, the distress of the labouring poor. It recited that the Grand Western proposed to open a line of railway, with the consent of the landowners whose lands it should cross, from the county town to a point on the eastern boundary of the estate of Ashworth, and it prayed for the usual powers of survey, of entry, of compulsory purchase, and of compensation — powers that, as Hollis pointed out, had been granted to a hundred railways before and would be granted to a hundred after, and that differed from the ordinary in only one particular. The strip of land over which the compulsory powers were prayed ran, as the crow flies and the coal runs deep, along the ridge above the common and down toward the lower meadows — the shallow edge of the basin, the ground that Fenwick's charts had shown to hold the first and cheapest coal. It was not a railway line. It was a key, cut to fit the lock that the trust deed had made. "The trustees will oppose it," Arthur said. "The trustees will oppose it," Hollis agreed, "and the opposition will cost money, and the money will be spent, and the bill will pass, because the House does not refuse branch railways, and your lordship's opposition will be recorded and remembered and counted as the ordinary obstruction of a great landowner who does not wish to see the value of his property diminished." He paused. "Unless the valley itself speaks. The petition of the tenants carried weight with the committee last year. The petition of the tenants, properly drawn, properly witnessed, properly argued — that is the one thing in this kingdom that a railway promoter cannot buy. It is the only currency he cannot counterfeit." The valley learned of the bill as the valley learned of everything, through the church porch and the market and the talk at the manor gate, and the talk was not the talk of the year before. The year before, the valley had been afraid. This year, the valley was angry — angry with the patient, settled anger of people who have been told, for the fifth time in a twelvemonth, that the ground they stand upon is not theirs after all. Thomas Gillingwater came to the manor with the news that the company's agent had been through the village offering money for signatures to a counter-petition — a petition praying the House to pass the bill without delay — and that two men had taken the money, and that the village knew who they were, and that the village would not forget. "Let them take the money," Arthur said. "A man who has taken a shilling for his name has learned the price of it, and the price is a lesson he will not soon forget. We do not need their names. We need the valley — all of it, the whole of it, standing together in the same document, with the same hand holding the pen." The petition was drawn in the second week of June, and it was drawn by Hollis, and it was carried round the valley by Thomas Gillingwater and the other tenants who had stood with Arthur in the committee room and the storm and the hearing, and it was signed in the church porch and the market square and the doorways of a hundred cottages, and Catherine, who had been at the manor for forty years, read it aloud in the great hall to the assembled house, in the voice she used for the reading of the accounts, and when she had finished she said, "There is a signature here, my lord, that I did not expect to see." The signature was at the very bottom of the page, in a hand that had not written anything in the valley for sixty years — the hand of old Mrs. Tollervey, who lived alone at the head of the eastern lane and had not been outside her garden in living memory. Arthur went to see her himself, the next morning, and he found her sitting by her window with a tray of letters at her elbow, letters in a hand he did not know, and she looked at him with the eyes of a woman who had been waiting a very long time to be asked the question he had come to ask. "You knew the Vane family," Arthur said. "Before I was earl. Before the old earl. You knew them." "I knew of them," Mrs. Tollervey said. "As a girl I knew of them, the way the valley knew of them, the way the valley knows of the weather — because they were always there, on the far side of the ridge, working the ground that runs under our feet. There were Vanes in this vale before the first Pemberton ever took the title, my lord. They were not gentlemen, and they were not tenants. They were the people who dug the coal when there was coal to be dug, and they were gone before you were born, and the valley forgot them, the way the valley forgets what it does not need to remember. But they did not forget the valley." She held out the letters. "They have been writing to each other about this ground for sixty years. The name on the prospectus your people found — the name of the company — it is the same name that is in these letters, going back to the year I was born." Arthur took the letters, and he read the first one, and the date was 1796, and the hand was the hand of a man who wrote of the seam beneath the eastern ridge as if it were a thing he had been promised, and the signature at the foot of the page was the signature of a Vane. "He has not come to buy the valley," Arthur said slowly, to himself, to the room, to the valley beyond the window. "He has come to take back what he believes was his. He has been waiting — his family has been waiting — for sixty years. And we have been standing on the ground the whole time, my lord and tenant alike, without knowing what we were standing over." The petition was sent to London with the signatures of two hundred and fourteen men and women of the vale. And Arthur, in the library at Ashworth, with Mrs. Tollervey's letters spread out before him, began the work of learning the true history of the ground he had spent five years defending.