第79章 The Fourteen Days

The Vice-Chancellor took eight days as he had taken nine before, and delivered himself on a raw morning with the gas lit in the chambers and the vale's people standing along the wall in their good coats as they had stood in August, hats held before them, saying nothing, weighing what silence weighs. He began where Prendergast had hoped he would not. "The doctrine of percolation," he said, "is good law, and I am not invited today to unmake it. But the doctrine excepts water flowing in a defined channel, and upon the evidence — measured fall, barrelled construction, continuity sworn from chamber to river by witnesses who went into the ground to obtain their knowledge — I am compelled to find that the plaintiffs have shown a substantial question of such a channel; and that the waters of that channel are, upon the same evidence, substantially the waters now being drawn away at Cinder Slack." He looked over his spectacles at counsel for the Union. "A defendant may not plead that he drains only his own water while the evidence is that the water walks to him from his neighbour's house along a road built by the neighbour's grandfather. The question of ownership goes to trial. Meanwhile the pump shall not drink while the court is counting." The order followed in substance: that until the trial of the action, appointed early in the next term before the Master of the Rolls, the Midland Union, its servants and agents, should draw no water by means of the level known as the catchment level at Cinder Slack, nor conduct any water from it, nor connect it with shafts or engines sunk or to be sunk; that the works already driven might stand, timber being timber, but idle; and that the plaintiffs give the usual undertaking in damages — which Hollis had insured against beforehand, the trustees' counter-security lodged with the bank since September. Costs of the day against the Union. And then the sentence that undid half of it: "There will be a stay of fourteen days upon the injunction as prayed, the defendants perfecting their appeal papers, no prejudice to either party arising." Fourteen days. The words were hardly out when Verrall's solicitor was at the bar of the court giving notice formally, so that the shorthand writer should carry it north by the afternoon train; and Hollis, walking out with Arthur past the wall of silent tenants, said what everyone was already arithmetic-ing privately. "He asked for nothing else, my lord. The whole appeal is a calendar. Fourteen days of lawful pumping, under protest, pending perfection of papers his clerks perfected a week ago — you may be certain they were engrossed before we opened our mouths. Whatever she loses, she loses by law, in daylight, with costs." He halted on the steps and looked down at the fog lying in the squares like a tide. "Unless the fourteenth day finds us inside his works with the service perfected and the engines stopped by main strength if need be. Go home, my lord. Count your days." They counted them. In the library at Ashworth a sheet of paper went up between the windows, ruled into fourteen squares, and Catherine chalked the first square full the evening they returned, because the household had agreed without ceremony that the countdown should live where the whole war's bookkeeping lived. Fenwick laid his plans for the trial of the action as a sapper lays mines — bore-logs, weir figures, salt dishes sealed afresh under wax, the ninth chamber copied yet again into duplicate books, one for Lincoln's Inn, one for the churchyard safe. Trevanion walked the drove road nightly with the senior form's captain, teaching the boy the signs of working ground at any season, because somebody, he said, must keep the parish's eyes in training whatever lawyers did with their ink. And Vane, who had not been down the ladders since October, The chalked squares filled with more than crosses. Day five brought a wire from Prosser: *TIMBER STILL GOING IN. ENGINES BEING SET ON THEIR FOUNDATIONS, NOT MOVED — READ THAT HOW YOU PLEASE.* Day eight, a rumour ran the eastern lane that the Tollervey well had turned bitter overnight, and the lane was at the buckets before dawn in a fear no argument had ever managed; but the morning's entry, taken before witnesses, read sweet, and the well-book was carried door to door by two girls of the senior form, and the fear died of arithmetic before noon, which Eleanor said afterward was the finest victory of the whole campaign precisely because nobody would ever hear of it. Day ten, Marie drilled her eleven in answering counsel: how to say *I counted* without apology and *the book says* without pride; and Will Clegg, watching from the doorway with his cap off, remarked to the caretaker that he had known prizefighters train lighter for belts. sent for Arthur on the eleventh day and gave him, wrapped in oilcloth against damp, the last thing the family kept:He was at the library window when Arthur came in, standing — the spring had bent him past chairs for anything but nights — looking north across the park to where the scarp hid Cinder Slack behind five miles of England. "I have been trying to remember," he said, without turning, "whether my grandfather ever told me what a man ought to feel when the water begins to move against the work of his life. I find I never asked. There was always time to ask." He turned then, and held out the oilcloth parcel with both hands, and his eyes were dry and perfectly clear. not a map — Joseph had drawn none, believing maps betrayed — but the ledger itself, open at the flyleaf where three generations of hands had written their names and dates of taking up the watch, a column of Vanes running back beyond print, with room beneath Aldous's name for perhaps two more entries, and the pen beside it. "I have watched this fortnight from a window," the old man said, "which is more weather than my fathers ever watched from. Write your name, my lord, and the date, and let the book lie open where the household passes, for secrecy has cost this vale sixty years of forgetting, and openness will cost it less. Then go north on the thirteenth day. She will not wait for courts; she never has; and the man who meets her walking meets her best before breakfast." ---