第86章 The First Word

Arthur did not sleep. The lamps of Ashworth burned down to the last inch of wick while he sat in the library with the dead man's letter flat upon the desk before him, read for the fifth time, and the coal in the grate fell into the shape of a small hill and darkened, and he did not ring for more. The house kept the particular silence of a place where every other person sleeps after a victory and one man sits awake inside his own head, hearing the clocks. Beyond the park the vent stood open to the sea it answered, and the count of five came up the hill through the weather the way a held note comes out of a horn, and every man in the vale knew without being told that the two days upon the wire were the only currency that still mattered. The water had stopped being a theory some time in the autumn; it was a schedule now, and schedules are the one thing a rich man can always purchase. Prosser looked in on the hour, reported the Slack's fires banked and the engine-teams sleeping in their bothies, and asked, with the particular frankness of a man who had walked the Union's own level in the dark, whether the vale should be ready to go down in the morning. Arthur said the vale should be ready either way, and Prosser nodded as though the answer had satisfied a count of his own, and went out again into the dark. Near four Eleanor came down in her shawl, set a fresh candle at his elbow, stood a moment with her hand lying light upon the letter without reading it, and went back up, leaving the flame. She had learned, in ten years of this war, to hold her own count in her own lane, and she did not ask whose handwriting had come so late to the library table. Arthur watched the new flame settle and thought, with part of his mind, that she was the only person in all the vale whose books had never once surprised him; and the thought had barely finished before he wondered, without any alarm in it, whether that was because her books were true or because he had never yet asked her the right question. Fenwick came with the first grey of the morning, in his clean coat, the double Watch-book under his arm in its tarred canvas as a man carries a family Bible to a christening, and asked leave to speak. Arthur gave it, and the keeper of the count, standing with his back to the window so that the light lay flat and unreadable across his face, delivered what he had come to deliver. The war, he said, was nearly over in the only place where wars ever end, which is the pocket. The water had reached the sea and had been counted there, stroke for stroke, and the count was true. Verrall held the outlet of the foreshore under an act that no court had yet set aside; the vale could spend its remaining years contesting a lease the Union would outbid at every turn, or it could sell the vent into that lease for a rent, keep the walking water for its own wells and weirs, and let the Union pump the surplus eastward to its pans until the century tired of the sight of it. "Charge him for the door," Fenwick said. "The door is the one thing he has not priced. Every man in this vale has told you the vent was the end of the war, my lord. It is the price of it. Take the price, and the fourteen days are done for good, and no man has to go down that hill in the dark again." Arthur let the whole of it stand a moment, because the offer wore the shape of the truth and the feel of a key, and then he asked, mildly, what rent the Union might be made to bear. Fenwick answered with a figure, exact to the pound, and added that the union's engineers had already staked their pumps to the tide of the coming spring, upon the very date the frame of the sea-cock carried, if it were read the way the old keepers had taught it. Arthur nodded, slow, and asked how the keeper of the count came to know the hour of the staking, since the sale of the vent had been offered to no man and the timber of the staking had never been served upon the vale in any paper. "Any man of the water can read a tide's hour off that frame," Fenwick said. "The tide's hours stand upon the frame for every hand," Arthur said. "The hour of the staking lay in a letter from York. Two letters, and a wire, and a figure of the pans' first-year yield that no paper in this vale ever carried." He let the silence widen, and then drew the letter from his coat and unfolded its four folds, and read from it, slow, as a man reads a proof he is tired of: "The man they set to read them for you reads them for another as well. He has done so since before my father came home. And you will know him, when the water reaches the sea, because he will be the one who tells you what to do with it." He looked at the keeper of the count in the grey light. "You are the first to tell me, Fenwick. In all these years, and all these people, it was you who stood at my door before dawn to be the first." Fenwick said nothing, and did not run, and did not deny, and did not sit down either, because a man who has kept the count for thirty years does not sit down at the wrong side of a number; he stood where the window light could not reach his face and held the double book to his chest, and when he spoke at last his voice was the voice that had read the entries out at every shaft-mark of the war, only a degree lower. "You will want the whole of it before you want the worst of it, my lord." "Tonight the vale shall know," Arthur said, "for the vale is owed the count of its own reader as truly as it is owed the count of its water, and I will not rob them of it. But before tonight you will tell me everything, and you will write it down, because the count you sold is the one thing left that can buy the rest of us a road out of this quarrel. I will not hang you, Fenwick, and I will not forgive you, and I will hear the one before I decide the other." Fenwick put the double book upon the desk, opened it to the page of the thirteenth night, which stood in the original and stood no longer in the duplicate, and laid his hand flat across the empty place in the sewing. "It was my father's book before it was mine," he said. "And I have been paying his price ever since I took it from him."