第70章 Six to the Minute

The committee left on the evening train, and the arguments next morning were brief, for the sight of the ground had done what days of counsel could not: the sense of the room was everywhere conceded to have shifted, and the whips of the Union were observed at breakfast wearing the faces of men recalculating. The bill stood over for the report stage a fortnight. In the vale, the fortnight began with work. Fenwick rode north before dawn on the Wednesday with a cover story about limestone that deceived nobody and was not meant to, taking the high tracks along the flank of the scarp with a pocket compass and Trevanion's letter folded in his breast. At the sixth mile the ground fell into a fold the maps called Cinder Slack, and there he found it: an old ironstone adit reopened, the mouth squared new, timbers white as bone in the morning light, spoil thrown wide and bright and not yet weathered, rough sleepers of a tramway going back into the hill, and — coming out over his boots where he stood at the mouth — a stream of water clear as glass, constant as a pipe, and warm as a bath. He filled a bottle, took the temperature three times, paced the flow against time at the lip, and sketched the bearing of the level from the tramway's line: south-southwest, along the strike, straight as a rule toward the head-waters of the vale. Upon the timber beside the mouth a board was nailed, freshly painted, perfectly lawful: GREYSTONES ESTATE — LEVEL DRAINAGE, BY ORDER. His own minerals, his own ground, his own water. Nothing done that any statute touched. Everything done that Trevanion's letter had promised: the straw, in the jug already, drinking its lawful fill. He was back at Ashworth by dusk, and the library filled — Arthur, Eleanor, Vane, Hollis arrived opportunely from town, Graves sent for — and the bottle of warm water stood upon the table in the middle of the maps like an exhibit at a trial not yet begun. Hollis summed it standing, walking, coatless in the August heat, and his voice had the hard brightness it took on before battles he expected to lose. "Now we know the shape of the whole board, and I beg you will all look at it steadily. The bill was never meant to pass. Or rather — the bill is the *alibi*. While Parliament argues forty miles of rail, the level finishes itself quietly on private ground needing nobody's permission; and when the argument is lost — and it will be lost, gentlemen, money buys report stages — the act arrives to legalize the connection already dug, and the Union stands before the world as a railway company innocent of everything but enterprise. We have beaten them in Chancery with harm sworn and proved; but the harm now in progress happens upon their own land, to their own minerals, draining — they will swear — their own water. There is no injunction in Her Majesty's chancery against a man pumping dry his own cellar." He stopped at the window. "Unless. Unless the water is not theirs. And that, my lord, is a question of fact that will cost more to prove than the whole campaign to date, and the proving of it will take months we may not have, because the count is falling." "The count," said Vane, from his chair, very low. "Six to the minute, and falling," Fenwick said. "I have thought of nothing else for two nights. My lord — gentlemen — I misread the sign. I read the slowing as relief: pressure easing, the straw venting the cistern. But Trevanion's letter, and the temperature of this—" he touched the bottle, "—say otherwise. A feeder level does not relieve a cistern. It taps the layer *above* the lid first, the broken broken ground, and draws the mother-water up into it by suction of its outlet — and the pulse slows as the head equalizes, and then, when the channel is fully won—" he did not finish it, and did not need to; every man at the table had stood at a bulkhead and heard what the alternative was. The grandfather's verse said the rest of it, silently, around the room: *dig deepest of the nine.* It was past midnight when the storm that had stood all evening on the western ridge broke over the park, rain straight as plumb-lines, the lantern at the shaft head invisible from the windows; and into the middle of that storm, with the household long abed, came a knocking at the manor's front door — soft, deliberate, repeated — and Catherine went herself with a lamp, being past fear, and came back along the hall preceding a visitor soaked to the skin, grey-faced, carrying a wrapped parcel of oilcloth held together with the disinterested grip of a man who has stopped caring what it costs him. Silas Devereux stood dripping on the Axminster, declined a chair, declined a towel with a flicker of the old elegance gone strange at the edges, and looked from Arthur to Hollis and back with the expression of a man presenting accounts he can no longer reconcile. "You will wonder what I want, my lord, and I will come to it without ornament, because there is no ornament left in the matter. I have resigned my engagement with the Union as of tonight, and my resignation will not be accepted quietly, and after tonight I shall be a ruined man whichever way the ground falls — so weigh what I say accordingly." He set the oilcloth parcel on the desk and unwrapped it with fingers that would not quite obey: a survey book, half-bound, water-spotted, stamped inside the cover with the arms of the Midland Union. "Verrall's private field book of the northern scarp — Braithwaite's levels, and the instructions upon them in Verrall's own hand. I was given it to make my drainage report square with, and I made it square, God forgive me, and I have since seen the count of your water printed in the newspapers like a death-watch." His voice went out of true, and came back flatter. "I have read that ledger of yours in evidence, my lord. *Water is master here.* I built a borehead at the closes and let it run a week, and I have told myself since that I did not know. Tonight I know. Hear the last of it and judge me after." He opened the field book at a leaf marked with a cross of ink, and turned it to the lamp, and his hand was steady now, entirely steady. "You must see what your enemy is really digging for, my lord. It is not coal." ---