第83章 The Calais Petition

The fourteenth square was chalked through to its final corner on the evening the party came home to Ashworth, and the vale, which had lived on quarter-news for a month, had a full day's meat in the telling: that the door stood open, that the water walked through it at five, that the Union's heading had sunk a drift through a grandfather's wall and been marked and measured for it, and that beyond the drift there lay a vent to the sea older than the oldest quarrel. The porch heard all of it twice and would have heard it thrice, and the well-club ordered a standing treat, and Will Clegg, in the doorway with his cap in his hand, said that for the first time in the war he had heard a figure he could drink to. It was on the second morning after, while the chalk still lay thick at the edges of the fourteenth square, that a hired chaise came up the drive carrying a gentleman and an attorney, and the gentleman, rising before the horses had stopped, gave his name as Guy Pemberton, of Calais, and his business as the recovery of his inheritance. He was a slim man of forty, dressed quietly and well, with a face that had been taught to look pleasant and had not quite learned, and he carried a paper of the Master of the Rolls' court sealed with the Union's solicitors' endorsement, and at his elbow a foreign register of marriages bound in boards, and behind him in the county papers, that same day, a letter signed *A Pemberton Wronged* that rehearsed an old and careful lie. Hollis, fetched from the library, read the petition standing in the hall and went the colour of the paper, and handed it to Arthur without a word. The petition's substance was ten years old and the dead man's work. It pleaded that the secret marriage of the late Lord Leo had been no marriage, being bigamous — that a prior ceremony stood upon record in the register of the English chapel at Calais, bearing the same groom's name and a date six months earlier — and that the issue of a void ceremony could not inherit; that the title and the estates, so the argument ran, had therefore never lawfully passed to Leo's line, and that the entail, leaping over the bastard issue, had fallen to the brother's line, and that the petitioner, as Sir Julian's son by a marriage of his own long concealed, stood in that remainder. It prayed a declaration against the ninth Earl, a stay of the water suit until the pedigree was determined, and a commission to examine witnesses abroad; and annexed to it there was a schedule of particulars that made Arthur's hand close on the paper — the number of the ninth chamber, the count of the rungs in the driven shaft, the weight of the salt dishes to the grain, and the line of the Vane ledger's flyleaf, quoted verbatim. None of those particulars had ever left the vale in any paper that a stranger could read. The manor had been turned inside out onto counsel's table, and nothing in the petition explained how. The vale received the news as it received all weather, by posting about it, and the post-weather that week was foul. Holt's letters got so far as the county town; the county press paragraphed *A Pemberton Wronged* with relish; and in the lanes the old doubt that Clegg had renounced came up again like a weed in a wet year, and honest men asked one another whether the circus blood could hold against a record in boards. The school answered for itself: Marie set her senior form to copy out the petition's schedule in two hands, "so that the children of this valley shall know the shape of a bad paper as well as they know a good figure," and Catherine, who had not spoken of the old wars in years, spoke at supper at last and said only: "He is a face at a window, that one. A claim is a man. And I have watched the man across the table of this house through a longer war than his." Hollis, walking the park with Arthur on the third day, put the arithmetic of it without comfort. "The appeal was a calendar; a petition is a siege. It will be heard on affidavit and counter-affidavit, it will travel to the Rolls, it will cost a term, and whatever its merits — and they are none — its price is time, and the time purchases Verrall's pumping. I have sent to Redruth for Trevanion's chalked log and to the schoolhouse for the copies, and we shall answer it in open court where a paper can be held up to the light." He stopped at the north wall. "But there is a soldier's question that precedes the lawyer's. The schedule knew our books, my lord. Somebody has been reading to them." That night the two of them, with Hartwell sent to watch the library as he had watched the east wing, found the library at three in the morning with the far window unlatched and the Vane ledger-case standing open upon the desk — nothing taken, nothing torn, the flyleaf turned face-down as a reader turns a page when the candle fails. Hartwell, examining the latch, said only, in the voice of a man who had kept doors in another service and kept them well, that the visitor had come in, that he had come out with a key, and that he was not the petitioner, because he had seen the petitioner at the sign of the Anchor in Rye last season, walking with the Union's parliamentary agent — and no gentleman of Calais, he said, had need of the river stairs. Eleanor, when the household gathered grey at breakfast, did the thing that steadied them: she took the chalk from its nail and wrote the date full upon the fourteenth square's last empty line, and then turned and said to the table — "He has named himself for the son of the false heir. Very well. A name is answered in daylight with books, as Hollis says, and books are what we have kept better than any family in England. But mark this, all of you. A counterfeit claimant is a counterfeit of one thing only, and that is the true man. Somewhere in this vale there is a hand that read to them, and it is colder than the hand that signs itself Pemberton. While we are fighting the paper in London, we are to keep the books in the churchyard safe, every one, and the churchyard safe shall sleep two of us a night until I am told who reads our ledgers for strangers." They looked at her, and at Arthur, who nodded once; and no one in the vale spoke that morning of the water, which was the truest measure of the alarm. ---