第75章 The Cure

The blocking came out over three days, brick by brick and barrow by barrow, each load carried up the shaft and stacked under tarpaulin in the order of its removal, so that the arch could be rebuilt if any court in England should ever require it; and behind the last stone the air changed, and every man in the chamber felt it on his face before his lamp could show him why. A draught, steady as breath, cold at ankle height and warm above it, moving out of the hill toward the south-west: the Cure, breathing through eighty years of sealed dark, because a channel that carries water must carry air with it, and she had never stopped walking. They went down the passage on their bellies for the first twenty feet and then upright, Trevanion first with the long tape, Fenwick after with watch and notebook, Arthur behind them carrying the spare lamps, and Vane, against the united protests of everyone who loved him, third from the last, because he said — and no man cared to argue theology with him underground — that a grandfather's door ought to be walked by a grandson's legs if there were legs to walk it. The drain proved to be an engineering of the age of horse and hand: barrelled in brick on a floor of slate, five feet in the crown, wide enough for two men shoulder to shoulder, laid to the fall chalked over the archway and running true as a rifle bore. Water walked in it, clear over slate, shin-deep, silent, unhurried, older than every quarrel now alive in England. Fenwick did what he had dreamed of doing all summer. At the first junction where an old side-adit met the main channel he set a weir board across the flow — planed oak, seated in clay, levelled with a spirit-rule — and measured her walking: depth over the sill, time with the watch, three trials, the figures entered before they left the spot. Two hundred yards on, a second board, another set of figures, the fall confirming the chalk to within a hand's width in the hundred. By evening light, when they came up into a world going gold, he had what no witness in Westminster could give him and no money in Lombard Street could buy: a defined course, continuous, ancient, engineered, running from the taster's chamber toward the Bybrook at a measured gradient with a measured body of water walking in it. The chemistry followed within the week, done thrice over for safety's sake. Fenwick boiled samples to dryness in the school laboratory under Marie's eye — water from the Cure, water from the ring, water from Cinder Slack in Devereux's bottle, water from a cottage well on the eastern lane as control — and weighed what remained; and the salts spoke plainly enough for a committee of farmers. The well ran almost nothing. The ring left a modest residue, sweet to the taste still, the cistern's own character. But the Cure's walking water and the northern straw's warm outflow left residues near identical, heavy with the same bitter signature, and warm within a degree of one another; and when Devereux was shown the two dishes dried white upon the scale-pan, the engineer looked at them a long time and said only, "There is my report corrected," and went out and sat alone in the garden till dusk. They swore the evidence before the magistrate at the county town on the Thursday — chain of hands complete: trustees' resolution, hood stones numbered, rungs counted, columns copied, weir boards figured, residues weighed — and read the whole of it aloud in the church porch on the Sunday between services, because the vale had earned the right to hear its own history in its own churchyard, and the porch had heard every other document of this war. Will Clegg stood through it with his arms folded and his face shut; but afterward he asked Fenwick, not belligerently for once, what a thing like that weir board of his would cost by the day; and being told, he named a price of his own instead. "Then put me on the measuring, master, and not the arguing. I've carried coal-questions in my head two years, and my head's the lighter for setting one down. If yon water walks to the river in a brick road her grandfather built, that's wages of a kind too — the kind that comes up the well every morning whether the pit pays off or no. I'll keep your boards true, and you'll find me honest at the figures, and Clegg'll say no more about rain you can't eat." He kept the boards true from that day to the end of the affair, and his entries in the Watch-book are there yet for any man to audit. Before the magistrate, when Prendergast's junior — sent down to watch and report — suggested that boiled dishes proved only that water was wet, Fenwick set four dried residues before the bench in a row and invited the court to taste them with a clean glass rod apiece, which the magistrate did, and the county town dined for a week on the story of a beak seasoning his own summons. The row ran: lane-well, hardly salt at all; ring-water, salt enough to notice; Cure-walking and Slack-warm, brothers under the brine, indistinguishable even to counsel, who tried them twice and wrote in his brief, visibly against his interest, *identity of waters — practically demonstrated*. Hollis summed the week standing in the porch doorway while the congregation ebbed round him. "A year ago we owned a noise," he said. "At Chancery we bought a wall around the valley. Today we own a river-road under it, dated, mapped, and sworn. My lord, the next paper I serve on the Midland Union will begin *In the matter of an ancient watercourse known as the Cure*, and when Prendergast reads those words he will grow older before your eyes. We can sue at last." He smiled thinly. "We can also be countersued, appealed, delayed, and inspected into the next reign. Suing is not winning, sir. It is only fighting in a room where the books are read." Devereux, passing the churchyard gate as the porch emptied, stopped beside the war memorial the parish had not yet built and looked a long while at the graves of men whose grandfathers he had lately made arguments about. "In Lombard Street," he said to Arthur, quietly, "we priced everything by the quarter-day. Your people price by the generation. I begin to see which bookkeeping survives its auditors." Then he walked back alone along the lane, upright as ever, under escort, past cottages whose curtains twitched and, for the first time, twitched without hatred in them. ---