第49章 The Vote

The Court of Chancery was not a court that Arthur had ever expected to stand in, and he stood in it now, in the last week of October, with Hollis beside him and the fate of the trust in the hands of a judge who had heard a thousand such petitions and would hear a thousand more. The Master of the Rolls was an old man with a face like a ledger, and he listened to the company's counsel argue that the trust, by its own terms, was failing in its purpose — that the beneficiaries for whom the mineral rights had been settled could not benefit from a fortune that was being held in the ground against the day when the ground should be worth more, and that the court, which existed to remedy the failures of trusts, should compel the trustees to sell, and pay the proceeds into court, and let the beneficiaries be paid what was theirs. It was a strong argument, and it was argued strongly, and Arthur, listening to it, understood that Vane had not chosen this ground carelessly. He had chosen it because it was the one ground in England where the trust deed, however nobly drawn, could be made to read against itself. Hollis rose to answer, and he did not argue that the trust was wise, and he did not argue that it was well-administered, and he did not argue that the estate was losing nothing by keeping the coal in the ground. He argued the one thing that the court could not ignore: that the trust had not been created by the earl for his own benefit, but had been settled upon the beneficiaries — the tenants of the vale, the children of the Academy, the labouring poor of the valley — and that the beneficiaries, who were the parties the law existed to protect, had not been heard, and would not be heard, and could not be heard in a court where the only parties were the trustees and the company that sought to buy what the trustees could not sell. "The beneficiaries have a voice in this matter," Hollis said, "and it is a voice that this court has never heard and will never hear, because they are not parties to this suit. They are the people for whose benefit the earth was settled. They are the people who stand upon it. And I will not have their inheritance taken from them in a room in which they are not represented, upon the argument of a company that has never set foot on their ground except with a surveyor's chain." The Master of the Rolls heard him out, and he reserved judgment, and the case went over, and the autumn turned, and the valley waited, and the lamps on the far hill did not return, because the surveyors did not need to survey a ground that the court was about to order sold. Arthur spent the weeks of the judgment with Mrs. Tollervey's letters and the maps of the old workings, and he learned the history of the ground the way a man learns the history of a country he has been asked to govern, and what he learned changed the way he read everything. The judgment came on the twelfth of November, and it was the judgment of a careful man. The court held that the trust was valid; that the trustees had not failed in their duty; that the sale of the mineral rights could not be compelled while the trust continued to serve its purpose; and that the petition of the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company was dismissed, with costs. Arthur heard it in the body of the court, and Eleanor heard it with him, and they did not embrace, because one does not embrace in the Court of Chancery, but the clerk who carried the news down the corridor before them was grinning, and the valley, when the news reached it by the evening coach, rang the church bell until the oldest men came out to say they could remember a worse noise. But the judgment, as Arthur read it again that night in the library at Ashworth, contained a single sentence that Hollis had marked in the margin, and it was the sentence that Vane had been waiting for since the first survey. The court had held that the trust could not be compelled to sell — "while the trust continues to serve its purpose." And the court had added, in the measured language of the law, that if the trustees should ever determine that the purposes of the trust could be better served by the realisation of the mineral rights than by their continued reservation, the court would not stand in their way. The bill had been the key. The clause had been the door. And the judgment, Arthur understood now, was the invitation — the invitation for the company to stop trying to take the ground and begin, instead, to make the ground so expensive to keep that the trustees themselves would let it go. The letter came the following week, and it was from Vane himself — the first letter Arthur had ever received from the man whose name had been at the foot of every scheme. It was short, and it was courteous, and it was the most dangerous letter Arthur had ever read. "My lord," it said, "I have watched you defend this valley for five years, and I have come to the conclusion that you are fighting me in ignorance of what the ground is, and what it has always been. The basin beneath your feet is not a fortune that your father settled upon your tenants out of benevolence. It is the inheritance of a family that worked this ground for three generations before the first Pemberton ever took the title, and that was dispossessed of it by an act of Parliament that your ancestors procured, and that has been waiting, through every generation since, for the ground to be returned to them by the only means the law of England allows. I am not a speculator, my lord. I am the last of that family. And I am prepared — before the cost of this becomes what it will become — to put the whole of the matter before you, in the house where my grandfather worked the coal that your grandfather took. I ask you to come and hear it. I will meet you on the far hill, at the old shaft head above the common, at any hour you choose. I will come alone. I ask that you come alone." Arthur read the letter twice, and then he walked to the window and looked out at the far hill, where the old shaft head stood above the common — a ring of stones that the valley had used for years as a watering place, a thing so ordinary that no one had ever thought to ask what it was. The war of paper was over. The war of the ground was about to begin. And it was not, Arthur understood at last, a war against a stranger. It was a war against a name that had been written into the soil of the vale before his own family had ever stood upon it. He took up his pen. "I will come," he wrote. "Name the hour."