第87章 The Price of the Book

The book had come to Arthur out of the wreck of his father's study the way most true inheritances come, not by the will but by the accident of who was there when the shelves came down, and what he had paid for it was not money, only a silence he had kept so long it had grown its own roots in him and had to be dug out now, in front of Fenwick and the river court and the assembled faces of the valley, before he could set down the words he had carried since he was a boy too proud to ask what they meant. He told Eleanor the night before that he would have to say them aloud, and she, who had married into the Pemberton name without ever marrying into its silences, told him that a price paid only once is not a price but a purchase, and that his had never been either, and that he was, in the end, going to do a plain brave thing and she would be at the back of the room when he did. The ledger proved three things and the first two were the ones the valley already half knew, that the Pemberton seat and its outfall to the sea had been settled not by conquest or by the accident of blood but by a covenant of keeping, a written promise that whoever held the house would hold also the gate that let the fresh water down to the salt and would never, for money or for a railway's greed, shut it or sell it or let it silt, and that his father, in the year before he died, had tried to undo that covenant in the only way a coward can, by moving the book so that the promise would look like the forgery and the forgery like the promise, and Arthur, at seventeen, had seen him do it and had said nothing, and had taken the book back afterward and had said nothing about that either, and the price of that long silence was what he was bringing, at last, into the light of the river court. The third thing the book proved was the thing Verrall had not known existed and had spent a fortune of injunctions trying to bury, that the Midland company's own deeds of the foreshore ran, in their own careful legal hand, not to the high water nor to the low, but to the sea-cock itself, which meant that the company's title to the ground it proposed to pump across was derived from the very gate it was trying to destroy, that Verrall stood on Pemberton's promise to complain of Pemberton's price, and that if the covenant fell the company did not win the land, it lost its footing on it and became, in the plain language Fenwick reached for with real pleasure, a squatter on the threshold it had come to break. Arthur set the book on the table of the court with the empty place in the sewing uppermost, and read the covenant aloud, and his voice did not break, and the valley, which had waited a generation to hear the truth of its own water spoken by the man who held the seat, did not cheer, because it was not a thing to cheer, it was a thing to keep, and the keeping of it was what they had been doing in the dark for forty years without a book to point to, and what they would go on doing when he sat down with the price at last paid and the silence dug out of him and set, like a stone returned, back into the wall of the house he had spent his life refusing to be ashamed of, and Eleanor at the back of the room, and the gate, and the water going down to the sea exactly as it had been promised, patient and correct and free. Verrall's counsel, a cautious man named Caulfield who had taken the brief against his better judgment and read the ledger the night before with the sick attention of a surgeon finding the tumor he suspected, put the only real question he had to it, whether the covenant bound the Pemberton to the gate or the gate to the Pemberton, whether it was a burden or a title, and Fenwick answered him for once without a single wrinkle of the statute, that it was the oldest kind of both, that the family that keeps the gate is the family that owns it and the family that owns it cannot let go without losing, which is why his father had not destroyed the book but only hidden its meaning, and why the meaning had cost a son twenty years of quiet, and why the valley had kept the water clean not out of virtue but out of the simple stubbornness of people who will not, on any lord's say-so, let the one door they have be bricked up. Arthur gave the book into the court's keeping that morning and not into his family's, which was the real restitution, the setting down of the price, and the registrar entered it as evidence and the covenant as law and the foreshore as what it had always been on the ground, a trust that no injunction could touch, and when they came out into the wet street of the town the Gillingwater men were already ringing the change that meant the water was free, and Devereux, who had drawn the company's own map of the very ground it forfeited and had carried the guilt of the lines like an ache, stood under the awning and shook Arthur's hand once and said, in his flat northern way, that he had thought the price of the book was his to pay, and had been glad of it, and that a man can be relieved to learn he is not needed, and then he went back to the hotel to finish undoing, leaf by leaf, the survey he had sold, because the ledger had taught even him that a line drawn to serve a lie is a debt that comes due, and there was no more use drawing it.