第64章 The Engineer's Report

Devereux's report came out in July, printed in quarto upon heavy paper with the Union's arms at the head of it, priced at half a crown so that only gentlemen would buy it, and summarized gratis in every newspaper the Union's agents thought worth buying; and it was a masterpiece of its kind, which is to say that every figure in it was true and every conclusion followed honestly from a false premise, in the manner of a road that begins straight and ends over a cliff. Its author styled himself *Silas Devereux, Civil Engineer, formerly chairman of the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company*, and his subject was *the drainage of the district adjacent to the proposed line*. The cistern of the vale — he dealt with it courteously, almost tenderly, as one handles a superstition one has outgrown — existed doubtless as the sworn witnesses described; but the notion that it required guarding was, he demonstrated with tables, an error of scale. Sixty feet of cap rock, pressures computed from the depth of the water, gradients carried across six inches of map: the report concluded that the body of water was limited, local, and finite; that it drained naturally toward the river by ways already ancient; that pumps of modern power could control any conceivable rise; and that the fears of the parish rested upon "the natural reverence of simple communities for the sources of their supply, which this report respects, but which cannot be suffered to govern the engineering of an empire." The proposed remedy was printed as Plate III: feeder levels driven northward under the scarp, to intercept and conduct the supposed inflow into Verrall's own workings, thence by his own adits to his own rivers — the vale's cistern, in short, to be plumbed, metered, and sold back to it by the gallon, with the Union retaining the profit on transit. Hollis bought twelve copies and distributed nine. Fenwick took one to the church porch on the Thursday, where the trustees now held their sittings in term time, and demolished it publicly, gently, and completely, in forty minutes, using nothing but the report's own figures and the Watch-book. Scale, he showed, was precisely the error: Devereux had computed the cistern's size from the visible ring of stones, which was not the cistern but its overflow vent — as well measure a brewery by its waste-pipe. The pressures were real; that was the terror of them. And the natural drainage he invoked had run through the Vanes' old adit for two lifetimes until March, and had been measured ever since, and the measurement showed the water rising notwithstanding, which no finite locally-fed pool would do against a free outlet. "Mr. Devereux has proven," Fenwick concluded, folding the quarto, "that the water is deep, warm, pressurized, and fed by something his instruments did not trouble to find. I am grateful to him. I could not have afforded the printing." The porch laughed, for the vale had earned its laughter that year; but Fenwick was aware, through the whole exhibition, of the report's true weight pressing elsewhere. Plates II and IV mapped the northern scarp in detail he had never published — contours over ground where no surveyor of theirs had walked — with the old ironstone diggings marked, and one feature inked in that no one unacquainted with working plans would notice: a dotted line, running south-southwest along the strike from a fold of the hill called Cinder Slack, annotated in the smallest type on the sheet, *proposed catchment level*. Catchment. The word of gardeners and reservoir men, meaning: the place where water is collected. Devereux had put the straw on the drawing and labelled it plumbing, and priced the whole operation into a bill for a railway. The trustees caused one paragraph of their own to be printed as a paid notice in the county papers and posted upon the churchyard gate, worded by Hollis with an economy that was itself an argument: *Whereas a report has been published respecting the drainage of this district which describes the water beneath the parish as limited, local, and finite: the trustees give notice that the said water stood four feet below the rim of the ancient shaft-mark in April 1843, stands level with it today, and has been counted weekly by sworn observers throughout. Figures are kept at the Academy, where any gentleman may examine them; the water itself may be heard any evening at the ring of stones, without fee.* Eleven gentlemen examined the figures before August, two of them sent down expressly by London societies, and every one climbed the drove road at dusk afterward, because there are demonstrations no committee room can counterfeit. That evening he climbed the drove road with Arthur, as he now did two nights in three, and they kept the count together at the rim stone — seven, always seven, the number had become to Arthur like the tick of the house clock, noticed only in its absence — and under the first stars Fenwick said what he had withheld since June. "My lord, I owe you my hesitation confessed. Since the dry spell began I have run the balance myself, night by night: rainfall against outflow against the standing level. With every artificial hole sealed, the cistern should be falling a hand's breadth by August. It is not falling. The surplus entering it equals, as near as measurement permits, the yield of a stream the size of the Bybrook in ordinary winter — entering from somewhere, silently, warm." He paused, and the lantern at the shaft head behind them threw his shadow long across the circle. "There is no stream, my lord. There is no spring in that direction unrecorded since Domesday. What enters warm from the north, having been a long way under the world, is water someone's level has let out of ground hotter than ours — or water someone's level has released from pressure it was bred under. Either way, the straw exists. Trevanion prophesied it, and Devereux has drawn it, and I can time its pulse. What no man can yet show is the mouth of it. It lies five miles off, on ground we may not enter, behind men paid to be deaf." "Then we will find the mouth," Arthur said, "or we will make the House send men who may." "The House," said Fenwick, "sits in August heat in a room with bad air, hearing counsel argue about a railway. My lord, I have begun to dream about that dotted line. In the dream the committee approves the bill, and the level is finished lawfully, and the first thing the vale loses is not its water but its count — for a water that rises and falls at another man's pleasure cannot be watched, only obeyed." He shut his notebook, and its clasp sounded in the dark like the cocking of a small piece. "I shall want a horse tomorrow before dawn, and a cover story about limestone." ---