第85章 The Foreshore

The spring tide fell upon a Thursday in the new year, a day of mild air and a low sun over the western shore, and the vale came with the party as far as the cove-head by carts and on foot, in its good coats, quietly, the way a parish attends a christening; and Catherine brought the Watch-book, and Marie brought her senior form with their blank books, and Gillingwater brought the bell in a cart, saying that a door that had waited ninety years for opening should be opened to sound. They went down the cliff path to the culvert mouth in two parties, the lamps lit though the day was fine, because a sea-cock that had not been seated since the year of the healing was a dark business whatever the weather above; and the water was there to meet them, warm under the vault, walking at five to the minute as she had walked every measured day since the arch was unkeyed, and she had risen to the seam of the valve in the night and had been waiting upon the wedges, patient and enormous, the whole body of the vale's old walk gathered at the gate of the sea. Trevanion and Fenwick took the gearing in the old order, the flannel tools laid out upon the sill as upon a table, the wedges driven home and drawn again, the seizing worked loose joint by joint while the lamps threw their shadows across the lettering above; and Devereux stood by with the tide-table in his hand, having computed the minute of the turning, and gave the word at last, and the valve went over in its frame with a sound like a great door unbarred, and the beating under the floor changed. The water came through the opening the way a held breath comes out of a man when the fear is done — evenly, without haste, a body of it the height of a man's chest moving out into the culvert and down toward the shore, and at the face of the cove it met the returning tide, warm against cold, salt against salter, and the two waters stood together for a moment in a line of white that the sun caught before it broke. Arthur stood in the outflow to his knees, holding the bar he had carried through the whole war, and counted as he had been taught to count since boyhood; and the count held, five to the minute, and the vale's entries for that day, in every hand that wrote them, carried the same sentence at their foot: *She has reached the sea, and the sea has received her at the old vent, and neither is diminished. — the Vale.* It was the first entry in the whole war that none of them felt the need to argue with. They found the Union's work when they came round the point to the foreshore: a headwall of new timber running out from the Crown shore on trestles, unpainted, the sap still bright where the planes had lifted, and a board nailed across it in fresh coppers — a legend in the company's lettering, reciting that the Midland Union, lessee of the foreshore under an act of 1840, would conduct by main and culvert the surplus of its levels to its pans upon the eastern shore, and that interference with the conduits would be visited with the pains of trespass. Lord Verrall was standing in the door of the ganger's hut at the landward end of the wall, his coat off, his hands folded, watching the tide, and he came down to the waterline to meet Arthur as though they had appointed the hour at a hunt ball. "You have opened your grandfather's door, my lord, and I have bought the porch." He nodded at the trestles. "It is a matter of the outlet now, and the outlet is the whole of it. Your water may walk where she likes; upon my foreshore she walks into my pipes, upon my lease, under my act, and the pumps at the Slack will drink their fill of the deep while the courts are counting what the tide has done with her. I told you the calendars would fight for me. This is the calendar of the spring." He was unperturbed as a stone, and what he said next he said with the drowned-pit gentleness: "I have priced the whole of your war, sir. It comes to a valve and a lease. Yours opens; mine holds. You have spent a generation proving the water is the vale's. It is — and it is at my tap." They stood two deep in the noise of the tide while the vale's people watched from the cove-head, and it was Trevanion who broke the silence, coming up from the culvert niche with the lead case in his hands, having this time opened it against the daylight, and he laid it upon the flat of the timber wall and drew out its contents without ceremony: a scheme of papers in a fine clerk's hand, covered in subscriptions in the names of the houses of Lombard Street, and beneath them a single letter, folded four times, in a cramped and precise hand that Arthur knew as he knew the flyleaf of the Watch-book. It was dated the year before Sir Julian's death, and it was addressed to his brother's son, and it read, in part: *I have sold the grandfathers' design that I stole, to the men who build the engines, and bought with the price the one thing I could still buy — your silence and your safety, for so long as the papers sleep. Guard your books, nephew. The man they set to read them for you reads them for another as well; he has done so since before your father came home, and he will do so until the water reaches the sea. You will know him, when it does, because he will be the one who tells you what to do with it.* Arthur read the letter twice at the timber wall, with the tide turning at his boots and the whole of the party gone quiet behind him, and then he folded it and put it inside his coat, and looked at Lord Verrall, who had not read it and knew that he had not read it, and said: "Then we are at the tap together, my lord, and the tap is a calendar of its own. My grandfathers' vent stands open to the tide, and my windows will watch your pipes as I have watched your levels. Keep your lease. I will keep her walking, and I will keep my books — and I am now told, upon a dead man's paper, that there is a man among mine who reads them for you. Find him I will, and the finding will be the next paper I serve on you." He turned from the foreshore and called the vale up off the cove-head, and as they went up the path the mail-rider came over the shoulder of the cliff with a wire in his hand from the Rolls' registrar: the appeal against the interim order had been allowed in part, and the stay upon the Union's pumping would stand for a further two days and no more. Verrall's fourteen days had come round again, with the difference that this time the vale stood at the sea with the door open and the count in its books; and Arthur, reading the wire at the top of the path with the party gathered, said what all of them had been taught to say by the water itself: "Two days, then, and the pumps at the Slack may run. She can walk to the sea in a day and a half when she chooses, gentlemen — and we know how she counts. Answer her." And as the party turned down the road, he found himself looking at the backs of his own people with the dead man's sentence beating time in his head, and asking, of each of them in turn, which one of them would be the first, before morning, to tell him what they should do with the water now. One of them, he knew, would speak; and the speaking, when it came, would name him the traitor of the flyleaf out of his own mouth. ---