第58章 The Hearing at Chancery

The trial of the whole matter came on before the Master of the Rolls in the last week of January, and it was different in one respect from every suit that old court had heard in a generation: the people of the vale were inside the bar. Hollis had applied at the opening for leave that the trust's beneficiaries be heard by counsel, and the Master — the same ledger-faced old man who had reserved judgment in November, and who had spent the interval, as the profession discovered, reading the newspapers with more attention than judges confess to — granted it in a single sentence. "The persons whose wells are in question," he said, "may be heard through counsel to the extent that evidence taken on their behalf is received; they may not address me directly; and this court is obliged to observe that they ought not to have needed five years and two bills to reach its attention." So the case was tried twice over in effect: once in affidavits and cross-examination, once in the slow accumulation of faces along the wall — Gillingwater and his tenants, Trevanion out of place and unemployed, Fenwick with his charts, Marie Pemberton with her schoolchildren's well-book, which she was not permitted to read from but held open upon her knee throughout, like scripture. Prendergast conducted the company's case with a heavy magnificence, calling engineers of his own to prove the water might be managed, pumped, grouted, and carried away in pipes; and for two days the court listened to the modern science of making the earth behave. Against it Hollis set no science at all for an entire afternoon, but history: he had the Vane ledger itself produced under subpoena from the trustees' safe, and he read it to the court slowly, entry after entry, the three generations of hands succeeding one another across the years like voices, until the room forgot it was listening to exhibits and understood it was listening to men — and then he came to the last leaf, and read the seventh earl's line, and laid the book down open upon the desk. Twice in those days the court reached past the bar for the vale itself. Thomas Gillingwater was sworn, not as an expert but as a tenant, and gave his evidence standing very straight, in the voice he used for reckoning at market: how many households drew from which wells, what a dry summer meant before the falling began, and what it had meant this year with it. Asked by the Master whether he spoke for others, he answered, "I speak for the well-club, my lord — forty-one families at a penny the month, rope and bucket held in common since my grandfather's day. A man learns what water is when he owns one share of it." And the Master wrote that down. Later, when Prendergast described the trust's purposes as "the benevolence of a former owner," the old judge looked over his spectacles at the wall of tenants along the room and said, mildly, to no one: "It looks to me more like the prudence of several thousand present ones." "Your Honour has asked what the trust was created to keep. There is the answer, written before the trust existed, in the hand of the man who drew it. He kept the ground unbroken because the ground, broken, would have broken the valley. That was his purpose. It is our purpose. And we say that a purpose so held for sixty years, at such cost, by two families who owed each other nothing but the truth, is entitled to come before this court wearing better credentials than sentiment." Counsel for the beneficiaries — a young man named Acheson, retained for almost nothing because half the barristers' mess had subscribed to see the thing fought — cross-examined the company's engineers to a standstill on their own figures: pumps sufficient, they swore, if the water rose no faster than a given rate; and the rate, Fenwick demonstrated from the sworn logs, had been exceeded every month since April. Murchison gave his evidence with the economy of a man who had rehearsed it against his own conscience for a year, and when Prendergast put it to him that his opinion was speculation, he answered: "It is measurement, sir. Speculation is what your clients did with it." Devereux sat through the hearing at the company's table, elegant, watchful, saying nothing, and the Master looked at him exactly once. On the ninth day the court rose, and the Master said he would take time, and the vale went home through frozen mud to wait, and the waiting was the worst labour the valley had yet performed, because there was nothing to do with it. Thomas Gillingwater mended his cart. Marie drilled her map-children on depths and dates in case they should be wanted again. Eleanor rode the lanes with her notebook, though the notebook was full. Arthur walked up the drove road each evening alone, sat by the ring of stones while the light failed, and counted the beat of the hill with his bare hand flat on the rim stone — nine, then eight, then, on the last night of the month, with frost smoking off the grass inside the circle and the water standing level with the lowest stone, seven. The judgment came down by the London coach on the fourth of February, in a sealed box addressed to Graves, and Graves, whatever else might be said of the village solicitor whom Sir Julian had once found insufficiently capable, carried it up from the turnpike unopened at a dead run, and they gathered in the church porch — where else, in that parish, did any verdict of consequence get read? — and broke the seal standing, with the bell rope hanging still above them and the whole valley packed into the yard. The Master of the Rolls began by finding the facts as sworn: water, seal, borings, rise. He found the trust valid, and its purposes including, in his words, "the preservation of the ground of the common in its natural and unbroken state, as much as if those words stood written in the deed, for they are fairly implied by every other word that does." The company's petition was dismissed. Its works within the bounded area were restrained perpetually; its bores were to be capped within forty days and kept capped under inspection of the plaintiffs' engineer, costs following the plaintiffs throughout. And then, at the very end, in a paragraph Hollis would quote for the rest of his working life, the court added its reason: "This valley was settled by men who knew what lay beneath it and told no one, trusting the ground to keep its own counsel and their successors to keep theirs. The court neither approves nor condemns such silence; it observes only that the silence has been kept, and that the law, which breaks into most places, may properly pause at the mouth of a shaft."