第80章 The North Door

They rode north on the thirteenth day, before first light, in a frost that made the horses' breath into signal-smoke: Arthur and Trevanion and Fenwick mounted; Devereux in the gig with the engrossed order beside him on his knees, because the man who drew the plates should watch what followed them; Hollis's London clerk behind with the service copies; and Gillingwater driving the cart of tools, having declared that no door of this war would be opened while he sat home counting other men's hammers. Catherine stood at the gate as they passed, and did not say God speed or any blessing, but chalked something small on the tailboard as the cart went by, which was her way of both. The high tracks along the scarp were iron underfoot, and they came on Cinder Slack out of a red sunrise, five miles in two hours, and halted where the ground fell into the fold. The place had grown since Fenwick's August reconnaissance. The squared mouth of the old adit now opened behind a timber head-frame, new-pitched, tar still shining; rails ran from it down the combe to a siding where eight trucks stood loaded — cylinders in straw and sacking, riveted mains nested like cannon, pump-rods bundled green; a smithy shed breathed smoke; and from the adit mouth itself came the stream that had been clear as glass in summer, diminished to half its channel, and no longer running bright but heavy, faintly smoking in the cold, warm as a bath upon the morning air. Trevanion put his palm flat to the nearest truck-timber, then to the head-frame post, then held the flat of his hand toward the mouth like a man greeting a face. "She is coming up," he said quietly. "Feel the air of her, my lord. That is not ventilation. That is company." They walked to the mouth under the white wand of service, and found the gangs already below — hammers going somewhere in the dark, a regular knocking that none of them mistook for anything so innocent as industry — and at the tramway's lip a foreman rose out of a hut, wiping his mouth, big and unhurried, with an appeal-paper of his own already folded in his breast pocket the way other men carry a Bible. The order was read to him twice. He heard it through with attention, nodded like a man agreeing about weather, and produced his counter-instrument: notice of appeal perfected, writ of supersedeas applied for, and instructions, signed by the Union's solicitors, that works and drawings of water might lawfully continue until the appeal court's pleasure were known, the injunction not being operative within the fourteen days. "That paper lies," Devereux said, stepping forward, white to the lips with more than cold. "I drew those very instructions in August, in Mr. Braithwaite's office, at the Chairman's dictation. There is no such liberty in any rule of court, and your masters know it. Read him the order again, sir — the drawing clause — and mark him refusing service by force if he means to refuse it." But the foreman only looked past them all, up the combe, and took off his hat — and Lord Verrall came walking down from the head of the Slack with a lantern still lit in his hand against the last of the dark, alone, booted for underground, exactly as a man walks who has risen early to see the water rise. He came to a stop an even six feet away, glanced over the service copies without touching them, and greeted Arthur by name as though they had met at a hunt ball. "You are served, my lord, and I am appealed, and between those two papers stands fourteen days of English law, which I have bought dearer than you will ever know." He turned, and lifted the lantern toward the black of the adit, and the light went in along the rails and died. "You hear them knocking? They are not sinking, whatever your Captain's ear tells you. They are *opening*. The level reached her boundary three nights ago — I had the figure by wire while your committee men slept — and she came up the bore to meet us faster than Braithwaite promised me in June, warmer than he promised me, and sweeter than either of us deserved. My engineers wanted to wait for the courts." His voice dropped, and it was the drowned-pit voice, the counted-men voice. "I told them what I will tell you, for we are the only two bookkeepers left in this quarrel, you and I. Courts count precedents. Parliaments count votes. But water, Lord Pemberton—" the knocking inside the hill changed, deepened, doubled, became unmistakably a rhythm arriving rather than a hammer striking, and every man on that combe heard it and stood still — "water counts itself. She knows the road now. Your grandfather's drain showed her the way and mine has opened the door, and by Friday night, law or no law, she will be standing in my sumps asking for the sea. Serve your papers on the dark, my lord. It reads better than we do." He set the lantern down on the rail as one sets down a finished ledger, gave Arthur a bow that no gentleman could fault, and walked up the combe toward his carriage; and behind him, far down in the hill, the knocking gathered itself and rolled, patient and enormous, like the first wave of a tide that has found the gap in the harbour wall. Fenwick was writing before anyone spoke, kneeling with the Watch-book on his knee in the frost, and what he wrote he read aloud at the shaft-mark in a voice that carried to every man of the party and would carry, within the day, to every porch and kitchen of the vale southward: *October the — th, seven of the clock, at Cinder Slack, by permission of no one: counted from the north side of the hill, four to the minute, and quickening. The water has left our count. She is walking north. — R. Fenwick, for the parish.* "Home at the gallop," said Arthur. "Every ladder in the valley lit tonight. If she means to come to the sea, gentlemen, we go down and meet her at the door our grandfathers built — and this time we do not knock. We answer."