第71章 The Field Book

Devereux turned the field book upon the desk so that its pages faced the room, and the rain came down on the park like a verdict, and for an hour no one in the library moved except to hold a lamp. The book was Braithwaite's work in its bones — levels run along the northern scarp in a hand as neat as print, sections drawn to scales that shrank with depth, the coal measures hatched and numbered — but it was Verrall's book in its will. In the margins, in a firm upright script that Arthur had seen once before at the foot of an insurance schedule, the Chairman of the Midland Union had written his instructions to his surveyors; and the instructions did not speak of coal. *Drive to the Old Deep*, said a note against the sixth mile. *Depth there is everything. Let her come up gently — she pays better than coal.* Another, beside a bore recorded at Cinder Slack: *Warm already. Good. The upper water is only the servant. It is the mother we want at the door.* And against Plate IV, where Devereux's published report had labelled a dotted line *proposed catchment level*, Verrall had written in red chalk two words that Hollis read aloud twice because the room would not believe them once: *the tap.* "You understand now what I was given to square," Devereux said. His voice had gone flat and careful, the voice of a man reading accounts he has already checked three times. "My drainage report was to be the public story — limited, local, finite, pumps enough for anything. This book is the private one. The level they are driving at Cinder Slack is not a field-drain and never was. It runs along the strike at a depth below every seam worth naming, and it runs toward the head of your valley as a gun runs toward a mark." He wet his lips. "Your cistern lies under a lid of rock, my lord, and above that lid lies broken ground full of stored water — the layer Fenwick's arithmetic has been measuring all summer. The straw does not drink the cistern. Not yet. The straw drinks the pantry above it, and as the pantry empties, the cistern rises into it to fill what was taken — you have watched it do exactly that against every natural law of a finite pool. They are not draining your water, Lord Pemberton. They are coaxing it northward, fathom by fathom, until the mother-water stands within reach of shafts sunk on their own freehold. Then they will put engines on her." "Engines," Eleanor said quietly, "to lift warm salt water five miles from any sea." "To lift water that comes up warm out of English ground, madam, at any season, in any drought." Devereux looked at her with something like respect. "You have all heard me argue that a nation runs on coal. Verrall learned better before I met him, and he paid for the lesson. He stood in the Greystones deep when she drowned — I have seen the date in his eye ever since — and he buried men whose names he still pays pensions to, and he came out of that pit saying that coal is a wasting asset and water a perpetual rent. Bath houses at the slack. Salt pans along the leat. And between the scarp and the river, forty towns and ten thousand acres that will draw their supply, in dry years and wet, from mains owned by the Midland Union — metered, priced, and cut off in arrears. Coal buys a man a lifetime. Water buys him the county." He shut the book. "That is what I refused tonight to go on drawing pretty plates for. That, and the widow Harbury's cellar, which I insured myself, to specification, and which ran a week for nothing but my signature." Hollis had stood at the window through all of it, coatless still, watching the lightning walk the ridge; and now he turned and asked the question Arthur had been holding behind his teeth. "The letters. Where did a Yorkshire coalowner learn to call the deep water by a name out of your grandmother's kitchen?" "From paper," Devereux said. "He buys old paper the way other men buy pictures. When the Grand Western went down, its files went through four hands to a purchaser — your lordship knows the road those papers travelled — and among them was Braithwaite's field book of 1838, and bound into Braithwaite's field book a copied leaf of some country family's correspondence, sixty or seventy years old, describing a sick year when the wells of a valley turned brackish, and the cure driven secretly to the river, and the whole affair sealed under a promise of silence. There is a line Verrall has underlined twice, in the red chalk. *She is sweet so long as her drains are kept, and salt whenever men forget.*" Devereux smiled without pleasure. "He believes the leaf refers to ground he now owns the north end of. He may even be right. What he cannot know — what none of his hired science can tell him — is where the drains lie, or how the old men governed her, or why the pulse of your water keeps time like a heart. For that knowledge, this county has exactly one shop, and the shopkeeper is eighty miles away and dying by inches." Every face went to Vane. He sat as he had sat since midnight, very upright, his hands folded on his stick, an old man made almost entirely of attention; and when he spoke at last his voice came dry and even, as if the storm were someone else's weather. "Joseph my grandfather dug nine workings, Mr. Devereux, before ever the bulkhead was set, and numbered them in his own ledger, and taught my father the numbers as a nurse teaches letters. Eight he sealed with his own hands. The ninth—" the stick shifted a half-inch on the floor — "the ninth he did not seal. The ninth he left to be found by whoever asked properly. I have known since I was nine years old that there is a number nine, my lord, and I have walked past the door of it all my life, the way one walks past a churchyard gate, knowing the dead are there and needing nothing from them." He looked up, and his eyes were clear and terrible. "If the Chairman of the Union has bought himself a copy of one leaf of my family, then it is time the original family opened what it kept. Tomorrow, while you gentlemen fight him with paper, I will take my lord to the lane where the old field-map says Nine Chimneys stood. She has waited long enough for a thirsty man to come asking. And now she has come." Arthur sent the stable-boy to the telegraph office at first light with a message addressed to Captain Trevanion, Redruth: *COME. BRING CHALK AND YOUR WORST SUSPICIONS. THE WATER HAS A SECOND NAME.* Then he gave orders that roused the sleeping house — Graves summoned from the village, breakfast cooked for six, Devereux lodged in the east wing with Hartwell, late of Sir Julian's service, walking outside his door with a horse pistol he had cleaned for another master years ago and never once fired. Catherine laid covers with her own hands, being past ceremony at half past three in the morning, and paused at the library door on her way up. "He'll ruin you for this, sir, whatever the courts say," she said, meaning Devereux. "Men like that gentleman upstairs forgive a beaten enemy sooner than a converted one." She gathered the candle. "I'll see to his room myself. He shall have hot water and the good sheets, and I'll stand outside his door till the household wakes, because a man who changes sides in a storm deserves one night of feeling the ship changed under him kindly." ---