第72章 The Nine

They went up after breakfast, Arthur and Vane and Fenwick, while the parish slept off its haymaking and the hill stood dripping under a scrubbed sky; and Vane led them not by the drove road but by a green lane on the churchyard side that Arthur had ridden twice in his life and never thought about, between hedges older than the tithe map, to a fold of ground where nine low mounds broke the grass like knuckles under a glove. "Nine Chimneys," Vane said. "Field-name, nothing more, the surveyors wrote — chimney, they supposed, from some cottages long gone. Joseph my grandfather told my father there was never a chimney here in his day nor his father's. What stood here were the mouths of the workings, timbered like well-heads and hooded with stone, and the old people called the nine sisters, because each was sunk on the strength of a different listening. My family were not engineers, my lord, whatever the world has called us lately. We were tasters. Each sister answered a different question of the ground. The third told them the way the cold water walked. The fifth told them where the roof was honest. The seventh breathed, and by its breathing they knew the temper of the deep air. And the ninth—" he stopped at the largest mound, grown over with thorn — "the ninth my grandfather sank last of all, when he was older than I am now, and would never say plainly what it answered. My father believed it was sunk to hear the mother-water itself. My grandfather's ledger says only, against the ninth, one line: *Dug deepest. Heard her turn in her sleep. Sealed the eight and left the door for a thirstier time.*" Fenwick was on his knees before the old man finished, parting the wet grass with both hands as though the answer might be read off the sod, and what followed filled the rest of the morning: tapes and levels, a probe-rod borrowed from the estate yard, and the slow patient triangulation of a man taking the ground's testimony. The mounds lay in no line a railway would choose. But pace them in order, one to nine, and they described an arc around the head of the eastern lane like fingers closing — and the ninth, probed, struck timber at eleven feet. "Preserved," Fenwick said softly. "Dry ground over sound oak. My lord, if the hood stones are under the thorn as intact as the timbers are under the soil, we could open the ninth in a week with leave of the trustees and a sworn witness at every barrow-load — and inside it, if your family's habit held, the whole mind of your grandfather written where only a thirsty man would look." He stood, wiping earth from his hands, and looked down the arc of the sisters toward the vale, where smoke stood up straight from the cottage chimneys of the eastern lane. "And consider what the opening buys us besides history. A taster's chamber is built to compare waters — depths, tastes, seasons. If Joseph Vane kept his columns there as he kept his ledger, we hold, in his own hand, eighty years of readings of the deep water. Evidence, my lord. Dated, located, witnessed by the ground itself. No committee in Westminster can call that sentiment." Hollis came down from London that evening with the law in his saddlebags, and the law was worse than he had hoped and better than he feared. He stood at the end of the supper table — the household too tired for ceremony, Eleanor pouring, Devereux eating silently at the far corner under Hartwell's eye — and gave it to them like a surgeon describing a wound he means to save. "There is a decision of last Michaelmas term, *Acton against Blundell*, in the Exchequer. A mill-owner pumped a colliery dry through his own ground, ruined his neighbour's water, and the court held he owed nothing — because water that percolates through the earth, without defined course, belongs to no man and injures no man in law; each proprietor may dig his own well and drain his neighbour doing it. Every barrister in Westminster will tell Verrall the case is his armour entire. Pump your own cellar, my lord; the statute book holds no action." He let the groan pass round the table and finish. "Now the crack in the armour, and it is wide enough for our case if we can widen it another inch. The same judges, in the same breath of the same doctrine, have always excepted water that flows in a *defined channel* — a stream underground, a known course, ancient, continuous, ascertainable. Against a watercourse the old rules die. You may as well pump dry the Thames and call it percolation. So the whole war comes to one question of fact, and the fact must be proved as a surveyor proves it, not as a poet feels it: that beneath this valley the water walks in a channel — known, bounded, continuous from the hill to the Bybrook — and that the Midland Union's tap at Cinder Slack is siphoning that channel through a straw." "The Cure," Marie said, from the foot of the table. "The Cure," Hollis agreed. "The drain the old men drove to the river in the salt year. Your grandmother's letters say it was made, Mrs.—madam; your registers show its effect within twelve months; your ledger commands it kept. If the ninth gives us the map of it — if anywhere in that chamber the old tasters wrote the line of their drain — then we can find it on trust land, open it lawfully, walk a magistrate down it with a lamp, and serve Verrall with the one document his counsel cannot answer: a watercourse with a birthday." He looked round the table, and for the first time that hard bright battle-voice of his failed a little, and became merely human. "It is a slender thread, gentlemen. A chalked wall in a hole in a hill, and eighty years of weather against it. But I have seen this parish keep books through fire and theft and a winter of affidavits, and I will back its ink against Lombard Street's any day God sends." Nobody spoke for a moment; and then Catherine, clearing, said the thing the household repeated afterward to strangers as proof of how the gentry lived. "Slender thread or no, Mr. Hollis eats his supper while it's hot. The ground has kept her secrets eighty years; she'll keep another hour for mutton." ---