第90章 The Long Keeping

The ward went yearly between the four coasts after that first summer, and the Pemberton lad who crossed to the fourth shore and the island keeper's daughter who crossed to the foreshore each returned with the plain speech of their new home in their mouths, so that within a generation the valley could not tell its own accent from the island's and thought this a great joke rather than the whole of the covenant's secret working, that the gate, freely kept, would free the people who kept it from the smallness of their own names, and the earl's own child, Arthur's daughter, was raised a season on each of the four coasts before she could be trusted, at nineteen, with the ring and the reading of the first leaf aloud on the shortest day. Hollis, the old agent who had carried the family papers through three suits and now the peaceful keeping that needed no suits, put away his strong-box the year he retired and gave its key to the parish clerk, and made one remark before he went that Arthur never forgot, that he had served two earls and a hundred years of a family's long forgetting, and that the honest keeping of the water had cost less, in the end, than the dishonest owning, and that the Pemberton name, which had nearly destroyed itself believing it held the gate, had been saved only when it admitted it was held by it, and then he went home to water his garden and let the water court, at last, have nothing to do. Years turned, and the foreshore never again a soldier's ground, never again a railway's sump, only a gate and a wall going green and a coast that had learned its own whole face, and Arthur, gray at last and steady as the sea-cock's own pulse, walked the shore road the way his father must once, in the years before all the hiding, had walked it for the simple pleasure of a man whose water ran free, and the lad's voice, his grandson now, reading the covenant up ahead of him by the lamp, and the fresh running saltward through the gate his blood had hired itself to keep, and the whole long war of deeds and courts shrunk, in the hearing of it, to a single sentence, whoever stands at this gate keeps the water free, and that, in the end, had been the only title the family was ever truly given. Eleanor outlived the last of the injunctions by thirty years and kept the reading of the first leaf on the shortest day until her own hands could no longer hold the book, and then the grandson read to her, the way she and Arthur had read to each other across forty years of a gate set free, and she said, at the end, that a house saved is a small and temporary thing, but a gate kept free is a house that will never have to be saved again, because it cannot be lost, belonging to whoever comes to it in need, and the valley, which had known her and the Pembertons and the whole long court of waters, agreed, and rang the change for the water and not the verdict, as Gillingwater's people had always done, and the fresh ran on to the salt through the sea-cock his ancestors had cut and her own husband's silence had nearly sold, free, unhindered, unmapped by any company's greed, exactly as it had been promised before any family thought itself above the keeping of it. The ledger, the book that had started all of it, lay still in the parish chest with its honest scar unwounded, and the empty place where his father's name had been cut out was shown to every child who came to learn the covenant's first word, a visible teaching that a title is a trust that has forgotten itself and a trust is a title that has learned, and the four coasts met each season at whatever shore the year came round to, and the ward was chosen not from blood but from need, and the Pemberton line, having paid at last the whole price of a hidden book, sat down at the long table of the valley's keeping as one keeper among many, glad of it, and let the gate they had once believed their own to belong, freely and forever, to everyone who ever came to draw. The last hard winter came and went with the gate standing fast and free, and the valley, that patient keeper of its own forgotten law, drew its water down to the sea through the cock his blood had hired itself to hold, and no company's survey, no lord's forgetting, no court's long argument could shut it now, because it belonged, on the plain reading of the oldest stone, to whoever stood in need, and the Pemberton name, freed at last of the fatal error of owning what it had only been trusted to keep, went out into the world as one good family among the four coasts, no prouder and no poorer for the gate, and Arthur's great-grandchildren would cross the low causeway to the island and back without a thought, the whole seam of the water a single country, and the first word of the covenant kept ringing on the shortest night down the years, whoever stands at this gate keeps the water free, until the house that had nearly sold it had become nothing but the sound of that keeping, honest, legible, and set free for everyone to draw. And so the long keeping came home, at last, to the plain sentence that had begun it, and the gate stood green and open where a hundred years of deeds and courts and one hidden book had nearly bricked it, and the water of the vale ran free to the sea it had always been trusted with, and nobody worth the name of keeper thought, any longer, that the door belonged to the blood on the hinge.