第88章 Hilary Term

Hilary term opened in fog so thick that the pigeons of Westminster were walking, and by nine in the morning the little chamber on the Chancery side was full to its walls again, the public seats packed with the same capable liars who had crowded them at Christmas, Aunt Chloe at center-rear with her hat at an angle that meant the court was about to have the benefit of her full attention. The parties had changed shape. Lord Philip Vane sat no longer among counsel but in the body of the house, plainly dressed, a spectator at his own abandoned claim. At the claimant's table sat Mr. Josiah Pike of Cornhill — a neat, gray, still man with the careful hands of his trade and the eyes of someone who had bought and sold many a paper without once reading the hopes inside it — and beside him Mr. Selby, who had the air of a man fighting a rearguard with borrowed troops. And in the second row of the public benches, hemmed about by keepers, sat a girl of fourteen with an old brass lantern in her lap, unlit, its glass black with soot, who looked at the Vice-Chancellor the whole while with the flat attention of a person accustomed to judging weather and not being much impressed by it. Sir Charles Ampthorpe took his seat with the examination report already open at his elbow, and the business of the day was set before him: the trial of the genuineness of the deed of the sixth of November, 1781, and of the whole matter thereupon. Selby rose first. He had, he said, an instrument; he had an expert; he had an assignee who had paid good money for the instrument and asked only what the law promised any purchaser of value: that paper, genuinely old, should hold what genuinely was. Dr. Nettleton was sworn and gave his evidence with the smoothness of a man who has given it many times: the hand of the deed was mid-eighteenth century, the ink of the period, the seal composed by the proper dies, the parchment watermarked to no later date. The deed, in short, was old. Nobody in the chamber doubted him, because the deed's age had never been the question. "Then the instrument is established," Selby said, gathering his papers with the air of a man closing a door. "Genuinely old, duly assigned, discharging Blackmore of every condition whatsoever. On the genuineness of the paper alone, my client's title follows as night follows day." Mr. Barrow rose with the unhurried courtesy of a man opening his own front door, and the first thing he did was to thank Dr. Nettleton for his candor. "The court has heard," he said, "that the deed is everything it purports to be. Let that stand, and let us pass. Because the defendants have never once contended that the deed of November the sixth was a forgery. My learned friend has prepared for a siege where there is no wall." He set a single sheet of paper on the rail. "The defendants contend that the deed was something stranger, and sadder: that it was *true* — and that the man who made it, two days later, wrote out the whole truth of why he made it, and hid that confession where no deed of his could ever reach." And he read aloud the sheet dated the eighth of November, 1781, in the hand Rosalind had by then memorized down to its tremor: *I made it, and God forgive me the making. It was drawn to buy the estate a peace it did not earn, and I set the true condition apart from it on ground no deed of mine could touch. Let the court choose between a shield and a confession. One of them will outlast the law.* The chamber let the words settle, and Selby rose to object that a confession might bind a conscience and even a family, but could run no further; his client was a purchaser for value, in whose favor the deed spoke absolutely, and the dead hand of Hugh Thorne could not reach through the assignment to touch Josiah Pike of Cornhill. Barrow heard him out with the patience of a man watching a tide go out. "Then let us consider what my learned friend purchased," he said. "He purchased a discharge of certain manorial rights. The defendants will show the court that the ground on which the covenant actually stands was entered in the family's own ledgers as *outside the manor, outside the settlement, holden by no deed of the family nor of the crown*, in the year 1781 and again in the oldest book of the vault — and that Hugh Thorne's own steward kept it so for a decade after. One cannot discharge what one never owned. The deed is genuine, my lord. Its reach is the question, and that is a question of ground, not of ink." Violet took the witness box with her white gloves, and she did what she had come two hundred miles to do: she took the court, hour by hour, through the two hands on the sisters' charter, and matched them to the two hands on the lintel of the chapel at Greycombe, and set the cut corner of the register leaf against the stub it had been cut from, and read the crossing-verse from the oilskin receipt that had crossed an ocean in a carrier's lantern. "The chain begins in paper and ends in stone," she said. "The stone is still standing, my lord. Stone is the most patient witness we have." Then it was the girl's turn, heard in a silence so complete that the scrape of her boots on the step sounded like a thrown latch. She carried the lantern up with her, and set it on the rail before her, and answered what the Vice-Chancellor asked her — where she had found it, and when, and what had stood inside it when she lifted it — with the same flat economy with which she had asked for the keeper on a wet headland a month and a fortnight before. She did not raise her voice, and did not need to. And when Mr. Selby, cross-examining, proposed, silkily, that a girl of fourteen might have been told a story and made to carry it, Merryn looked at him with the patience of weather and said, "You may ask the lamp, sir. It has been burning before you all morning, and it never burns anything at all. If you can explain that to my satisfaction, you may explain the rest of my story to theirs." The chamber held its breath while Selby looked at the lamp, which burned clear and steady on nothing, and found, in the end, no question. Sir Charles Ampthorpe had written through most of it, and when the afternoon light began to fail and the last witness stood down, he leaned forward over the rail and looked at the two tables with an expression his clerk would later describe as the one he wore for a ledger that balanced. "This cause rests upon a headland," he said. "A chapel, a lintel, a niche, and a ground claimed to lie beyond every deed this court has seen. The court has examined papers until the paint is worn away, and the papers have pointed, in chorus, at a place." He looked at the fog at the windows. "I have never in forty years tried a view. I will try one now. Let the parties, their counsel, and the officer of this court attend me at the chapel of Greycombe, upon the headland aforesaid, on the first clear day hereafter, and let the stone speak for itself." He rose, and the chamber rose with him, in the particular hush that follows a court deciding to believe in geography. In the corridor, while the crowd washed past them, the girl asked what a view was, and Rosalind answered, taking the lantern that burned nothing back into her own keeping for the walk through the crowd, "It means the law has decided to go and look the story in the face. That is the bravest thing a court can do, Merryn. Most of them read forever instead." And the girl, walking beside her with the six words of the lintel silently above them both, said, "Then we have taught it to look. Whatever it sees, it will be seeing true."