第60章 The Sleeping Water

They worked by Vane's memory and the folded plan from the ledger's back, and both were good. The grandfather had left a relief-waste in his own seal — a small square opening, two feet by eighteen, cut through the clay and faced stone near the floor, plugged with a rammed clay core and hidden behind a single drystone fitted so close that eighty years of lamp-smoke had made it one wall with the rest. A man who meant the seal to be opened again someday, by the right men at the right hour, and who could not write the instruction aloud for fear of who might read it, had built the door into the wall itself and told no living soul where it stood. "Second stone above the floor line, third from the left-hand angle," Vane said, laying his palm flat against the face. "He showed my father when my father was twelve, and my father told me there was a door but not where, because he was waiting to be sure of me. I have been sure of this stone since I was nine years old." He took up the mallet and iron himself, looked once at Arthur, and struck. The drystone came away on the fourth blow. Behind it the clay core stood wet, dark, intact — sixty years of patience holding — and through it now, plain to bare ears in the lamplight without bar or iron, came the beat: seven to the minute, deep, unhurried, like something enormous turning over in sleep below the world. They cut the core out carefully, a hand's depth at a stroke, Fenwick timing each yield against the level of water standing in the gallery behind their boots; and when the last of it fell, the hill exhaled. The water came through the waste in a column as thick as a man's thigh, warm as a summer bath in the lantern-light, steady, without fury — pressure finding its appointed mouth after sixty years of making its own — and it went down the sloping floor of the gallery toward the lower heading, exactly as the plan promised, into the drain the Vanes had driven generations before to carry just such a night to the river. They stood back and let the grandfathers finish the work. It took until morning. At first light, soaked to the skin, hollow-eyed, Thomas Gillingwater came down the drove road from the river meadows with his hat literally in his hands, shouting before he could be heard: the adit mouth below the lower meadows was running full and brown and warm, the company pit at the closes was visibly lowering an inch in the hour, and Trevanion sent word that his pumps had won headway for the first time since the collar failed. By evening the danger was past. By the second evening the capped bores held, the pit stood still, and along the eastern lane the wells — which had sunk and soured and gone silent through the winter — began, well by well, cottage by cottage, to rise. Mrs. Tollervey walked up the far hill herself to see the third evening. Sixty years she had not left her garden, and she came slowly, leaning on Eleanor's arm, in her oldest black, and stood a long while at the ring of stones, where the overflow had fallen back within its rim for the first time since autumn, and the water lay quiet inside the circle, clear over clean stone, breathing faintly warm into the cold air. "My grandmother saw them seal it," she said at last. "She was a girl, and she watched from the lane, and she said the strange part was the silence — all those men working, and never a song, like men at a funeral." She bent, stiffly, and laid her hand on the rim stone, palm down, as one takes leave. "Tell them I am glad, whoever they were. The water tastes of nothing tonight. That is how it tasted when I was young." The reckoning between the families was made a week later, in the library, before Catherine and the trustees and Hollis come down from London to witness it — Hollis insisting that some documents are themselves events. Aldous Vane conveyed to the trustees of the Ashworth estate, for no consideration save the keeping, whatever claim, right, or memory of claim his family held in the ground beneath the common; and the trustees received the ledger of the workings, three generations complete, to be kept with the deed of trust in one case behind one panel, "so that," as Arthur wrote in the receipt, "the account of this ground may stand open to whichever of our successors is wise enough to read it and humble enough to believe it." Vane asked one thing in payment. On the gates of Ashworth Manor the Pemberton lions had stood beneath their three stars since before the seventh earl wore his title; he asked that the wheel and crown be cut beside them in the same oak, neither above nor below, and that no plate explain it. "Let the vale wonder," he said. "Wondering keeps a thing alive better than writing." Marie ruled the first page of a new ledger that spring — plain paper, schoolroom-ruled, bound in boards she covered herself — and gave it to the trustees to keep at the Academy, and its purpose was written on the first leaf in her round, uncompromising hand: *The Watch-book of the Waters of Ashworth, kept by the children of the school in succession, that the valley may never again stand upon its own heart in ignorance.* The children entered the wells, depths, tastes, and dates. Fenwick taught the senior form the timing of the beat. And on the first of April, at dusk, the estate set a lantern at the shaft head, renewed nightly by tenants in rotation, a watch-fire burning over the sealed ground as it had burned, in effect, for sixty years in the persons of two stubborn families — except that now the whole valley kept it, and knew why. It would have been an ending, and on any other page of any other story it might have served. But Hollis came down from London on the fourth of April with the coach, and he came straight to the library without stopping for food, carrying a printed bill and a face that cancelled all the spring. "The Midland Union of Coallords has deposited notice of a bill for next session," he said. "A mineral railway along the whole escarpment — forty miles of it, with powers of compulsory purchase wider than any act ever granted in this county, and standing powers to work, drain, and convey minerals under any land within two miles of the line. The parliamentary agents are Prendergast's chambers. The surveyor engaged is Murchison's former chief, who will swear anything for a fee. The chairman of the Union is Lord Verrall, who owns more coal than any six men in England and has never in his life seen a valley he did not price." He laid the bill on the desk, and beneath it a second paper, smaller. "And the engineer retained to report on the drainage of the whole district, my lord, whose name appears here in print — is Silas Devereux." Arthur read both papers twice while the fire settled and the dusk came into the windows. Then he went to the shelf where the new ledger stood, and turned its pages, and stopped at Fenwick's latest entry, made that very week, in figures as calm as arithmetic: the mother-water, drained, resting, its straws capped and its seal sweating no longer, stood in the ring of stones a full fathom higher than the level the grandfather had recorded in 1796. Something below the vale was rising that no bore of theirs had raised. Arthur closed the book, and rang for lights, and sent word to the church porch meeting for the morrow, and wrote in the Watch-book, under his sister's heading, the first entry of the earl's own hand: *The water sleeps. We keep the light. — A.P., April 1844.* Then he stood at the window a long time, watching the far hill go dark, where the little flame at the shaft head held steady against the wind — and beyond it, northward, where the escarpment ran its long black line toward Lord Verrall's coal and the next session of Parliament, and where, all unaware, the ground itself was keeping a count of its own. ---