第56章 The Proof

They swore the evidence at Ashworth in the second week of December, before Mr. Naylor, the magistrate for the division, who came down from the county town with his clerk and stayed longer than any man expected, because the evidence would not be hurried. Trevanion went first, with his roll of boring logs spread upon the long table like a general's maps. He gave his name, his trade, his thirty years in the mines of Cornwall and the north; then, question by quiet question from Graves, who had tried nothing bigger than an enclosure dispute in twenty years and grew into the work as a man grows into armour, he took the court through every hole the Grand Western had driven in the parish — depths, dates, strata, the warm water at forty feet at the ridge, the making-water bore at the foot of the common, the collar that burst, the orders given and withdrawn. At the end of it Naylor asked him one question of his own. "Captain, in your professional judgment, what lies under this common?" "Water, sir. A great body of it, under pressure, held up by a lid of hard rock about as thick as my arm is long, in places. I have sunk shafts through such lids before. In Cornwall we had a saying: the ground forgives nothing and forgets everything." Fenwick followed with his charts, and the charts were the thing that turned the magistrate from attentive to grave: the rings of failing wells drawn inward upon the hill, the rise of the mother-water plotted month by month against the company's four seasons of borings, the two lines crossing like swords. Then came the Academy's map — forty wells measured by children under Marie Pemberton's eye, each entry dated and signed in a schoolroom hand — and Naylor, holding it to the light longer than he had held anything else that day, said only: "The parish has spoken for itself. That is unusual, and weighty." Mrs. Tollervey's letters were read entire, the ink of 1796 brown as old blood; and last, Hollis made his affidavit of the descent, and stood after swearing it with the look of a man who has printed many things and at length been permitted to witness one. Murchison arrived on the third day, from the north, with his field books and his own account to settle. He had been the company's surveyor; he had measured the ridge in April and the meadows too; he had told his employers in writing that the basin was one body and that their bill proposed to tap the edge of a thing whose heart lay elsewhere; and he had been answered, he testified, with a request to confine himself to the powers of the act. His books were sworn. His opinion was taken. And when he had finished, he looked across the table at Vane — the two men had never met — and said, with the simplicity of a craftsman: "I measured your grandfather's mark in April and did not know what it warned. I know now. If the rods go down at those closes, it will be over ground I walked, and I will say so wherever I am asked." By the fourth day the affidavits numbered twenty-two, and Naylor, signing the last of them with his clerk yawning at his elbow, remarked to Graves what the county would remark for years afterwards: "In thirty winters on this bench I have taken depositions about stolen sheep, broken bridges, and one poisoned rick. This is the first time a parish has sworn to its own water. Somebody will write a book about it when we are all forgotten." The London papers, Hollis noted with professional satisfaction, had begun to send men down; the Morning Chronicle's correspondent took tea at the Academy, sketched the ring of stones from below the hill, and asked Marie, twice, whether the children's measurements might be printed over her own name. "Over theirs," said Marie. "They did the work." Widow Harbury came on the fourth day, though nobody had cited her. She was small, and straight, and dressed in the black she had worn since her son died in the Company's service in India, and she sat with her hands on her stick while Eleanor gave her tea, and she said what she had come to say to the room at large, in the voice of a woman settling accounts aloud so as to be done with them. "They sent Mr. Devereux's man to me with an offer, and I took it, because the roof tax alone is nine pounds the year and my eyes will not thread a needle now. I will not pretend I was forced, for I was not. But hear me, my lord." She fixed Arthur with eyes gone pale as weathered slate. "My man farmed those closes forty years and never a beast sickened drinking off our land, and never a well failed in the driest June God sent. Whatever you do with your law, see they put that right if it goes wrong. Promise me that, and my conscience is clear whichever way the world tips." "I promise it," Arthur said, "on the estate's honour, and I will put it in writing tonight." Hollis left for London that evening with three boxes of sworn paper and a copy of everything, travelling by the night coach like any tradesman with cloth samples; Arthur went with him, because the motion for an injunction would be heard at chambers in ten days, and there are arguments no barrister however good should be left to make without the man who owns the grievance sitting behind him in the bench seats, being seen. On the morning of departure the whole valley came down to the turnpike to see the coach pass — not organized, not called, simply there, as the parish had been simply there at the funeral of Leo Pemberton — and Thomas Gillingwater lifted his hat to the window and called out the only send-off the district ever used for its own: "The earth keeps faith, my lord! See the law does the same!" The coach rolled east through the frost with the valley standing in the white fields behind it. And eleven miles on, at the first change of horses, a rider overtook them from the direction of the ridge — a company servant, plastered with mud, carrying a sealed packet northward post-haste — and Hollis, watching him out of sight, drew his coat closer and spoke the thought neither man had said aloud in the valley. "He is carrying instructions to begin sinking at the closes before any court can sit. We are in a race now, my lord, and the other side has been running since April."