The Assizes of Blackacre

• Chapter 1 The Clerk’s Ledger
• Chapter 2 Blackacre’s Shadow
• Chapter 3 The Dust of the Archives
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Parish
• Chapter 5 The Summer Assize of 1923
• Chapter 6 An Empty Docket
• Chapter 7 Superstition and Soil
• Chapter 8 Margins and Watermarks
• Chapter 9 The Accused of Gallows Hill
• Chapter 10 Missing Folios
• Chapter 11 The Testimony of Elders
• Chapter 12 Tracing the Scribe
• Chapter 13 The Midsummer Gathering
• Chapter 14 A Trial in Closed Chambers
• Chapter 15 Secrets Beneath the Moor
• Chapter 16 The Second Witness
• Chapter 17 Erased Names
• Chapter 18 Nightfall at the Shire Hall
• Chapter 19 Echoes in the Belfry
• Chapter 20 The Unsworn Oath
• Chapter 21 Relics of the Old Faith
• Chapter 22 The Clerk’s Hesitation
• Chapter 23 The Concealed Parchment
• Chapter 24 The Village Silence Breaks
• Chapter 25 The Secret Verdict
• Chapter 26 The Record Restored

The ink supplied to the clerk of the assize by His Majesty’s Stationery Office was compounded of oak galls, ferrous sulphate, and gum arabic, and it possessed two cardinal virtues: it was extraordinarily permanent, and it smelled faintly of stagnant ditch-water.

Arthur Pargeter dipped his nib, shook the surplus bead neatly back against the rim of the lead well, and waited. His seat was three inches lower than dignity required, owing to the sagging rush bottom of the clerk’s chair, which had not been renewed since the winter sittings of 1904. From this hollowed vantage point, four feet below the high bench where Mr. Justice Frayne sat sweltering beneath thirty ounces of horsehair and ermine, Pargeter possessed an uninterrupted view of the county’s petty misery.

The calendar for the summer assizes of 1923 was, by ordinary standards, dull. There was a carter from High Melbury who had converted four sacks of seed barley to his own use, pretending the tailboard had sprung open on the turnpike; there was a melancholy girl who had stolen nineteen yards of ribbon from an outfitter in the market square; and there was an elderly stonemason charged with uttering threat of arson against the rector’s pig-stye. None of these called for the red ribbon or the heavy sheepskin binding. Pargeter recorded their pleas, their bail, their sureties, and the eventual destination of their persons—mostly three months with hard labour, for Justice Frayne’s digestion had been ruined by the liveries of the Grand Jury dinner the previous evening—in the ordinary buckram minute-book with the chipped brass corners.

It was four o’clock of a Thursday afternoon in July, and the court smelled of damp wool, melted tallow, and the peppermint lozenges which the senior constable sucked to keep from yawning. The flies made a dry, rhythmic ticking against the high lancet windows of the Shire Hall. Outside, the dust of the High Street lay thick beneath the iron rims of the hay-wains, and the motor-lorry from the cooperative creamery had broken its axle precisely opposite the King’s Arms, producing an intermittent chorus of swearing from two drovers and a boy with a handcart.

"Call the next," said Justice Frayne, without looking up from his notes. His lordship had a red, round face, scored like an old cheese, and a habit of dragging his pen across the margins of his private notebooks to see if the point had split.

Mr. Gabriel Skerrit, the High Sheriff’s officer, stood upon his toes, cleared a throat that sounded like a shovel grating over gravel, and consulted the slip of coarse paper held between his thumb and forefinger.

"Rex against Callow," barked Skerrit. "Thomas Callow. On the indictment of the parish officers of Blackacre. Misdemeanour. An unlawful assembly and breach of the peace, with intent to subvert the King’s lieges."

Pargeter’s steel pen hung motionless an eighth of an inch above the crisp white page. In the margins of the docket, opposite the name of Callow, there was no notation of parish settlement, no constable’s mark, and no signature from the committing magistrate. There was only a pencilled cross, and below it, in the sharp, spidery hand of old Mr. Clout, the attorney from the Close, the words: By special order of the bench, in camera if required.

The clerk glanced sideways. Beside him, upon the narrow desk littered with affidavits and summonses, lay the Great Ledger. It was eighteen inches from spine to fore-edge, bound in rough calf that had turned the colour of walnut juice over seventy years of legal usage. Its pages were ruled with double scarlet lines down the left-hand side, forming the gutter where the clerk must enter the nature of the felony, the crown witness, the finding of the Grand Inquest, and the judgment.

A stir passed through the back benches of the gallery, not the loud shuffling that accompanied the appearance of a horse-thief or a notorious poacher, but a dry, hesitant rustle, like dry leaves swept across a stone flags. Four men entered the dock. They were not from the town; you could tell that by the cut of their waistcoats, which were of undyed wool, and by the smell that followed them—a smell not of coal-smoke and ale-dregs, but of marsh gas, rotten elder-pitch, and the bitter grease used to waterproof sea-boots.

The first man, Thomas Callow, was sixty, perhaps seventy, with a beard that grew high upon his cheekbones like lichens on an ash tree. He held his hat—a low-crowned thing of stiff felt, devoid of band or buckle—pressed flat against his stomach with both hands. He did not look at the judge, nor at the jury, which consisted of twelve tradesmen from the county town who had spent the last two hours calculating the price of oats and wishing they were at their tea. He looked solely at the square of lime-washed stone between the prisoner's rail and the clerk's table, as though he expected water to rise through the floorboards.

"You are Thomas Callow?" asked the associate, rising on the lower bench.

Callow made a short, jerky movement of his chin. "That is what they call me in the bottom."

"You are indicted for that you, on the eve of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist last past, in the parish of Blackacre—"

Justice Frayne dropped his bone-handled pen. It fell with a dry clatter against the inkstand. "One moment, Mr. Associate. Where are the depositions?"

Pargeter turned the leaves of the case-bundle. The string was of common hemp, not red tape, and the knot had been tied with three hitches, such as boatmen use on the canal. Inside were two sheets of foolscap, folded lengthwise. There was no deposition from a surgeon, no statement of property stolen or damaged, and no recognizance from the petty constable of the parish. There was only an affidavit signed by the Reverend Giles Hallowell, curate-in-charge of Blackacre with High Lea, and an information laid by a person who described himself simply as 'A land-holder of the tithing.'

"There are no depositions from the petty sessions, my lord," Pargeter said. His voice was naturally quiet, trained to reach the ear of the presiding judge without disturbing the reporters who sat behind the dock with their shorthand notebooks on their knees. "The prisoner was committed directly by Sir Henry Vane under the emergency provisions of the third of George the Second."

"George the Second?" Frayne blinked, his heavy eyelids rising slowly like roller blinds. "Nonsense. The third was the Vagrancy Act. What has Sir Henry been doing? He is eighty-four if he is an hour, and his head was turned by the drainage dispute in the south hundred. Let me see the commitment."

Pargeter rose, gathered the papers, and handed them up to the dais. As he did so, he caught the eye of the prisoner.

Callow’s eyes were not defiant; they were dull, pale blue, and remarkably small, set deep behind folds of skin that had been tanned by the east wind until they looked like pigskin. On the middle finger of his right hand, where a tradesman would wear a signet or an artisan might show the callus of the plane, there was a loop of thin copper wire, twisted so tight that the flesh had grown up around it in a smooth, purple ridge. It was not jewellery; it was a charm, of the sort Pargeter’s grandmother in the fens had called a 'draw-stitch,' used to prevent blood from souring after an adder-bite.

The judge read the two sheets of foolscap twice. His colour, already high, deepened to the hue of a boiled beet. He looked over the tops of his half-moon spectacles at the grand jury box, which was now empty, the gentlemen having retired to their turtle soup at the White Hart an hour before.

"Mr. Clout," said the judge.

The old attorney rose from the well of the court. He was eighty himself, wore an alpaca coat that had turned green at the seams, and carried his papers in an ancient carpet-bag that had lost its carpet.

"My lord?"

"This information," Frayne tapped the foolscap with the back of his hand, "is irregular. It is worse than irregular; it is fantastic. The Crown cannot be heard to allege that twelve persons assembled on a piece of common land with the purpose of... what is this phrase? 'Renewing an unwritten term.' What term? An unwritten lease cannot be maintained in this court, as you very well know, even under the custom of the manor, unless there be copyhold evidence dating back to the first year of Richard the First. Where are your rolls?"

"There are no rolls, my lord," said Clout softly. He did not sound surprised. He spoke with the dry, whistling articulation of a man whose teeth were not his own. "That is the very kernel of the grievance. The parish of Blackacre possesses no rolls. They were destroyed in the fire at the bailiff’s house in the winter of forty-one."

"Then there is no title," snapped the judge. "If there is no title, there is no trespass. If there is no trespass, this man must be charged with unlawful assembly under the statute of the late King, or he must be discharged. The assize cannot sit here to determine ancient boundaries between the rector’s glebe and the waste. We are here for the jail delivery. Does the county prosecutor appear?"

"The county does not appear, my lord," Clout said, bowing slightly toward the empty benches reserved for counsel. "Sir Henry considered it better that the matter be treated as an extraordinary nuisance, punishable upon the information of the Crown's officer."

Pargeter looked back down at the ledger.

His pen had dried. A tiny spot of black ink had set like a bead of pitch upon the 'C' of Callow. In the margin, the official header read: Pleas of the Crown held at the Shire Hall on Thursday the nineteenth day of July, before the Honorable Sir Austin Frayne, Knight, one of the Justices of the King's Bench.

Below this, there should have followed the entry of the plea. But there had been no plea. Callow had not been asked whether he was guilty or not guilty. He had simply been produced, like an estrayed heifer or an unexploded shell brought in by the road-menders.

Justice Frayne glanced up at the gallery. The three reporters from the County Chronicle and the Advertiser were leaning over the iron rail, their pencils poised above their memorandum books. One of them, a red-headed youth whom Pargeter knew slightly from the billiard room at the temperance hotel, was already scribbling something in his pad.

"Clear the hall," Frayne said abruptly.

The associate looked up, startled. "My lord?"

"You heard me, Mr. Pargeter—no, Mr. Associate, clear the court. This is not an open trial. The matter touches upon the King’s peace in a manner that renders publication undesirable. Clear the public benches. The constables will see that the doors are locked from the outside."

"On what authority, my lord?" whispered Pargeter, leaning as far forward as his hollow seat allowed.

The judge did not look at him. His eyes were fixed on the four men in the dock, who stood together so closely now that their grey frieze coats seemed to form a single, woollen rampart against the oak panelling.

"Upon the inherent authority of the commission," Frayne said in a flat, dry tone that admitted of no argument. "The Court has the power to protect itself from scandal where the peace of the realm is concerned. Clear the court, Skerrit."

The clearing of an English courtroom in the year 1923 was a matter of some difficulty, for an Englishman who had paid nothing to get in felt he had a constitutional right to remain until he was carried out. The reporters did not go easily; there was a conference at the door, an exhibition of brass press-cards, and a muttered threat about the member for the borough, but Skerrit was seventy-two inches tall and possessed two constables who had served in the artillery and knew how to use their shoulders.

Within five minutes, the iron bolts of the main entrance had slid into their stone keeps with a hollow, echoing thud. The high, square room fell silent, save for the bluebottles and the heavy breathing of the clerk, who felt the summer heat gathering in the small of his back like a hot brick.

"Now," said Justice Frayne, leaning his elbows on the crimson baize of the bench and staring down at Thomas Callow. "You are from the tithing of Blackacre Bottom?"

"I am," said the old man.

"Sir Henry writes to me that you and your fellows have dug three trenches across the road leading from the lower water-meadows to the cross-roads at the seven-mile stone. He says you have filled those trenches with gorse and elder-stakes, and that on Tuesday last you turned back the mail-van with stones."

"The road isn't there," Callow said. His voice was quite thin, almost sweet, like the sound of a dry fiddle.

"What do you mean, it isn't there? It has been a county road since the Highway Act of fifty-six."

"It isn't there for seven days," Callow replied. "It never was there for the seven days after the Eve. It was the ditch then. It has been the ditch since the gray stones were pulled down to make the bridge for the mail-coaches. When the ditch is open, the sheep must go through the water-gate, else the salt-well goes black. If the salt-well goes black, there's no hay for the parish."

The judge gave a long, slow sigh that ended in a whistle through his teeth. "This is midsummer madness. The hay has nothing to do with the highway. Do you know that you are liable to three years' penal servitude for obstructing the King's highway?"

"The King has his road for three hundred and fifty-eight days," Callow said, without raising his tone by a semi-tone. "He has the use of the stone and the gravel and the ditches for the rain. We don't grudge the King his carts. But the seven days are the seven days. They were never his. They were never Sir Henry's father's, neither. They belong to the Acre."

"The Acre is common of pasture," Clout interjected from the well, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. "It is so marked in the enclosure award of 1802. But the parishioners have set up a claim to the sub-soil. They claim that the soil itself is subject to an alternate estate."

"Alternate to what?" Frayne demanded. "To whom?"

Clout did not answer. He merely shrugged his narrow alpaca shoulders until his coat-collar touched his ears.

Arthur Pargeter looked down at his ledger.

The page was numbered: Folio 142.

At the top of the folio was the Royal Arms, wood-cut, with the Lion and the Unicorn snarling through a tangle of smudged heraldic foliage. Below it was the blank space where the record of this county should stand for the next three hundred years, to be consulted by barristers, by judges of the high court, by historians of the shires, and by the clerks of the peace.

He dipped his pen.

Rex v. Callow, he wrote, in his best round clerk's hand, the letters leaning slightly to the right, the descenders of the g and the y brought down with a clear, uniform stroke that showed no tremor of the thumb.

"Write nothing," said the judge.

The voice was low, but it had the sharpness of a whip-thong.

Pargeter stopped. His pen remained half an inch above the sheepskin. A single drop of ink, black and heavy with its weight of iron, hung from the split of the nib.

"My lord?"

"Enter no record of this," Frayne said. He was not looking at the clerk; he was looking down at his own small, private notebook, which had no Royal Arms, no scarlet rules, and no sheepskin binding, but was covered in black cloth like a pocket-hymnal. "The indictment is not to be filed."

"The indictment has been read, my lord," Pargeter said, his professional pride asserting itself against the weight of the ermine. "The grand jury has found a true bill. It is on the file."

"Take it off the file."

"My lord, the Clerk of the Peace will require—"

"The Clerk of the Peace will require nothing that I do not direct him to require," said Justice Frayne. He leaned down over the high desk until Pargeter could see the broken veins on the bridge of his nose and the little dusting of grey powder that had fallen from his wig onto the scarlet wool of his tippet. "You are young, Mr. Pargeter. You have been in this court six months, I think?"

"Seven months, my lord. Since the November sittings."

"A legal record is a record of things that have occurred according to law. Where there is no law, there can be no record. What is happening in this room is not law. It is an accommodation. Do you understand that word?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Then blot your nib, Mr. Pargeter."

The clerk did not blot the nib. He let the drop fall. It struck the creamy vellum of Folio 142 directly beneath the words Rex v. Callow, forming a perfectly circular black star with eight microscopic points.

"Thomas Callow," said the judge, turning back to the four men in the dock. "You will go back to Blackacre with the constable. You will fill those three trenches before the sun goes down tomorrow. If the trenches are not filled, Sir Henry will send thirty men from the quarry with their sledges, and every cottage on the west side of the brook will have its thatch fired for a nuisance under the Common Law. You may tell your neighbours that I said so. I do not care a brass farthing for the Eve of Saint John, nor for the ditch, nor for the salt-well. The King’s mail will go through the bottom tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, or you will spend the winter in the cells at Dorchester. Do you hear me?"

Callow did not move. His hat remained flat against his middle.

"The water will come up," he said.

"Then let it come up," said the judge. "The mail has high wheels. Skerrit, remove the prisoners by the side gate. Do not let them pass into the street until the crowd has gone from the market cross."

The dock emptied. It did not take twenty seconds. The four men stepped down into the dark stairs that led to the cells beneath the hall, their heavy boots clumping on the stone steps like the hooves of cattle being driven down an alley. Skerrit followed them, his jangling keys loud in the empty court.

Clout gathered his papers, stuffed them into his carpet-bag without tying the tape, and made a short, crab-like bow to the bench.

"There is the matter of the fees, my lord," he croaked.

"The county treasurer will pay your costs, Mr. Clout. Send the bill to my chambers under the head of miscellaneous assize business. Write 're Blackacre drains' on the cover. That will satisfy the auditors."

The attorney shuffled out through the low door behind the witness-box, which shut with a click of its brass latch.

The judge remained seated for a moment. He took off his wig, revealing a head as bald and shiny as an ostrich egg, with two fringes of yellowed white hair above the ears. He wiped his skull with a silk handkerchief that had once been green.

"Mr. Pargeter."

"Yes, my lord?"

"You will scrape that page."

Pargeter looked down at Folio 142. The ink-drop had dried at the edges, but the centre remained a dark, wet lens, reflecting the lancet window and the gray clouds that were beginning to gather over the western hills.

"A knife will leave a rough surface on this sheepskin, my lord," Pargeter said. "The government parchment is not what it was before the war. The bleach is too strong. If I scrape it, the grain will show."

"Then cut the leaf out," Frayne said, rising from his chair. He did not look back as he went through the tall mahogany door that led to his private room, where his clerk had already laid out his tea and two dry biscuits on a silver salver.

Arthur Pargeter sat alone in the Shire Hall.

The room was very quiet now. The flies had ceased their ticking, for the air had grown heavy with the thunder that always came up the river-valley after four hot days in the hay-field. A wagon rumbled past in the street outside, its iron tires groaning against the granite setts of the gutter.

He took his penknife from his waistcoat pocket. It was an ivory-handled knife with a curved blade, ground hollow on the left side, such as stationers sold for erasing the errors of careless copyists. He opened the blade with his thumbnail.

The edge was sharp enough to split a hair. He held the blade flat against the parchment, just above the title: The Assizes of the Summer Sitting, 13 George V.

If he cut the leaf, the stub would remain. In fifty years, or a hundred, another clerk would turn the leaves of the Great Ledger and find that Folio 142 had been severed with a knife. The pagination would jump from 141 to 143. That clerk would look for the index; he would look for the quarterly return; he would wonder what sheep-stealer or what ravisher had been so shameful that his very name had to be excised from the roll of the county.

Pargeter did not cut the parchment.

Instead, he took a piece of clean grey blotting-paper, laid it carefully over the black star of the ink-drop, and pressed it with the ball of his thumb. He did not rub it; he let the dry wood-pulp drink the surface moisture.

When he lifted the blotter, the name remained. It was blurred, the C having run slightly into the ruled red margin, but it was distinct: Rex v. Callow.

Beneath it, in the five inches of empty vellum that should have contained the record of the trial, the jury's verdict, and the sentence of the court, he wrote nothing at all. He left the page as white and blank as an unploughed field in November.

Then he reached into his leather bag, took out his own private notebook—a thick, octavo book with blue marbled boards and a red linen spine, which he had bought at the stationer’s in the High Street for two shillings to keep his household accounts—and opened it to the first blank leaf.

He dipped his steel nib once more into the bitter-smelling ink.

Blackacre, he wrote at the head of the page. Thursday, 19 July, 1923. In camera.

He wrote down the four names of the men in the frieze coats: Thomas Callow, John Callow, William Diment, and the boy who was called only 'the Herd.' He wrote down the words the old man had spoken about the ditch, and the salt-well, and the road that was not there for seven days. He wrote down the phrase that old Clout had whistled through his false teeth: an alternate estate.

When he had finished, the Shire Hall clock over the main doorway began to strike five. The sound was flat and heavy in the empty courtroom.

Pargeter closed his private notebook, dried his pen upon the tail of his alpaca coat, and carefully shut the great brass clasps of the County Ledger. The lock was an old Bramah, which required two complete turns of the square-bitted key to shoot the bolt.

As the lock clicked, he heard the first heavy drops of the summer rain strike the lead guttering above the lancet windows. The rain would be falling on the turnpike now; it would be falling on the lime-trees by the river, and upon the common land nine miles to the west, where the four men were walking home with their hats in their hands, through the mud that was already beginning to fill the trenches.

The rain had not cooled the town; it had merely thickened it. By half-past six, the cobbles of the High Street were steaming like a wash-house copper, and the scent of fried herrings from the lane behind the corn exchange had mounted into the damp air to mingle with the sulfurous fumes of the shunting-engines down by the goods yard.

Arthur Pargeter carried his bicycle down the six semicircular stone steps of the Shire Hall with the gingerly reverence of a curate handling the communion plate. It was a Sunbeam—an oil-bath model of 1912, inherited from an uncle who had fallen off a hay-rick in the second year of the Boer War—and its enamel was still black enough to reflect the gas lamps, though the chain-case had developed a rhythmic, metallic wheeze whenever Arthur took an incline with too much ambition. He strapped his canvas satchel, in which the blue marbled notebook lay wrapped in oiled cloth alongside two hard-boiled eggs and a copy of the Law Journal, firmly to the rear carrier.

He had no business riding west. His lodgings were in Saint Jude’s Terrace, precisely half a mile to the east-north-east, where Mrs. Peake was even then preparing a dish of cold mutton and stewed rhubarb which would not improve with waiting. Mrs. Peake was a widow with strong views on the punctual observance of the evening meal, regarding a late lodger as an implicit affront to the Church of England, of which her deceased husband had been an indifferent sidesman.

Yet when Pargeter reached the fountain at the crossroads, where the granite horse-trough was slowly collecting dead elderflowers in the drizzle, he turned the front wheel toward the turnpike.

He did not know why he did it, or rather he did not care to define the impulse too sharply. A clerk of assize was supposed to possess an intellect formed exclusively of dried horsehair, red tape, and the third volume of Stephen’s Commentaries. He was not paid forty-five pounds a quarter to follow wandering countrymen into the marshes. But the ink-drop on Folio 142 seemed to itch under his fingernails, and the look in the eye of that old creature with the copper wire around his knuckle had been neither mad nor fearful. It had been the look of a man who was merely stating a timetable that had been printed before the engines were built.

The road to Blackacre left the macadam two miles past the toll-house, where the telegraph wires ceased their humming and gave way to low, untrimmed bullace hedges. Here the soil changed within the space of three furlongs from the honest, yellow gravel of the river-terrace to a dark, spongy loam that seemed to suck at the rubber of Pargeter’s roadster. The ditch-water on either side was iron-red, filmed over with that rainbow scum which farmers in the uplands attribute to mineral springs and which the cottagers down in the bottom know to be the sweat of the bog.

To the left, the ground rose toward the chalk downs, crowned with the shaggy crests of hazel-copses that looked, in the descending grey twilight, like the pelts of monstrous beasts asleep upon the ridge. To the right lay the Bottom: seven hundred acres of flat, sullen pasture intersected by rhines so choked with arrow-head and reed-mace that the sluggish current had no visible direction. Somewhere out in that grey expanse lay the seven-mile stone, and somewhere beyond it, where the willows turned their silvery under-leaves to the gathering wind, was the parish that possessed no rolls.

A mile down the lane, the hedges ceased altogether. In their place stood low dykes of turf, topped with stakes of dry blackthorn that had been split by the beetle and bound with willow-withes. It was poor land, sour with cold seepages, the kind of earth that grew sheep-rot in winter and summer-colic in July. The few beasts Pargeter passed were small, slab-sided things with wool as rough as coconut matting, standing up to their hocks in the sodden rushes and staring through him with pale, horizontal pupils that showed no recognition of the human species.

He reached the crossroads where the trenches had been cut just as the church clock at High Lea—three miles distant across the marsh—struck the three-quarters. The strokes came thin and dispersed over the reeds, like iron struck against lead.

The road did not look obstructed. It looked dismantled.

Three broad ditches had been dug diagonally across the gravel carriage-way, forty yards apart, perfectly straight and regular, as though set out with a surveyor’s chain. They were four feet wide and three feet deep, cut cleanly through the road-metal down to the blue lias clay beneath. The spoil had not been heaped upon the verges; it had been carried into the middle of the gaps and mingled with brushwood, huge roots of bog-oak that smelled of centuries of stagnation, and bundles of green gorse that had been trampled down until they formed a greasy, impenetrable hurdle.

A solitary light flickered two hundred yards ahead, down where the lane dipped into the water-meadows. It came from a hurricane lamp suspended from the tail of a road-contractor’s cart.

Pargeter dismounted, leaning his machine against an ash-pollard that was weeping sap into the muddy grass. His boots sank into the silt of the verge with a sound like a wet sponge being squeezed under an iron heel.

Beside the middle trench, three men were standing with long-handled grafting-spades. They were not working. They were leaning against the ash-poles of their tools, watching the water rise.

It was rising fast. It did not come from the ditch, nor had the recent thunderstorm produced enough surface-wash to flood a cart-rut. It was bubbling up from the bottom of the cut itself, through little vents in the blue clay that looked like miniature volcanos of slate-coloured mud. The water was not clear; it was yellowish, thick with some greasy suspended matter that left a yellow curd upon the turf edges, and it smelled of the bilge of an old ship.

"You won't get through with the Sunbeam, master," said a voice from the hedgerow.

Pargeter turned. A man was sitting on the horse-mounting block by the remnant of the old milestone. He wore the ordinary corduroys of a drainer, tied beneath the knees with dried rushes, but he had no spade. He was paring a turnip with a small clasp-knife, taking off the purple rind in long, unbroken curls that dropped into the mire between his boots.

"Is Thomas Callow returned?" Arthur asked, striving to make his voice sound like that of an official on His Majesty’s business, though the mud had already breached the welt of his left Oxford shoe.

The man with the turnip did not look up. He had the same flat, wide forehead as the old man in the dock, the same skin like salted bacon, and the same complete absence of hurry.

"Callow is down at the salt-gate," the man said. "He won't be up before the water stops. It won't stop while the moon turns."

"Mr. Justice Frayne directed that the road be opened before dark," Pargeter said, stepping closer. "He gave explicit orders. The constabulary will be down from the town with the dawn, and the quarrymen from High Lea."

The man sliced a clean white wedge of turnip, carried it to his mouth upon the point of the knife, and chewed it with slow, mechanical regularity.

"The judge has his book," he said, when his mouth was clear. "We've got the Acre."

"The Acre is subject to the County Council under the Local Government Act," Arthur said, though the phrase sounded foolish even to himself as it came out into the great, empty silence of the marsh. "The highway is vested in the Surveyor of Bridges."

The three men with the spades did not laugh. They did not even look round. One of them, a broad-backed fellow whose flannel shirt had split down the seam of the shoulder, stooped down, picked up a bundle of elder-twigs, and laid it with great deliberation into the middle of the yellow water that was now lapping over the stones of the highway. He trod it down with the heel of his heavy boot until the oily bubbles came up around his ankle with a hollow, clucking noise.

"There's thirty years I’ve seen it," the seated man observed, flicking another ribbon of rind into the road. "My father saw it forty. It don't come for the Crown, and it don't stay for the magistrates. When the salt-well runs over, the stone goes under. That’s the use."

"What is the salt-well?" Arthur asked.

The man shut his knife with a loud, oily snap that made Arthur jump. He wiped the blade against the greasy seam of his trousers and put it into his waistcoat pocket alongside three iron nails and a piece of chalk.

"You're the young chap from the desk," he said, looking Arthur over from his celluloid collar to his spattered trousers. "The one that held the big black book with the brass corners."

"I am the clerk of the court," Pargeter said with such dignity as he could muster.

"Then you’d better go home and write in it," said the countryman, rising stiffly. He was taller than he looked when seated, though he had the curvature of the spine that comes from fifty years of working the peat-trenches with an eighteen-pound spud. "Write that the water’s three inches over the gravel at the seven-mile stone, and that the mail-cart won't cross the ditch tomorrow, nor the day after, nor the day after that. Tell your old gentleman in the sheep’s wool he can bring his red coats if he has a mind to, but they’d better bring their stilts. The bottom don't hold horse-shoes when the grey stone is drowned."

He turned away, not toward the village, but out into the grey expanse of the marsh, walking along the narrow crown of a turf bank that Pargeter had not noticed before. His boots made no sound upon the sphagnum. In thirty paces he had dissolved into the mist that was beginning to smoke up from the rhines, leaving behind him only the scent of wet corduroy and the sharp, turnip smell of his meal.

Arthur walked to the edge of the first trench.

The water was already within two inches of the road-surface. It was completely silent, unlike the hill-streams which babbled over the flint; it rose with a strange, oily heave, without ripple or foam, lifting the heavy elder-stakes as though they were corks. In the middle of the channel, where the earth had been dug deepest, something was sticking up through the yellow sediment.

It was not a tree-root, and it was not a drain-tile.

Arthur knelt upon his handkerchief to save his trousers and leaned down, holding his breath against the stench of rotting marsh-grass.

It was an upright stone—a squared pillar of grey oolite, about nine inches on the face, roughly dressed with a punch. It was entirely unlike any stone used in the modern road-work, which was all crushed basalt from the council quarries at Mendip. Upon the visible face of the stone, two inches below the rising waterline, three marks had been scored deep into the limestone: not letters, but three small, circular indentations, connected by a shallow groove like a pair of spectacles with a broken bridge.

As he watched, the yellow water reached the lower circle. A tiny swirl of grease formed around the stone, spun twice, and vanished. The ditch was filling not from the sky, but from some great, deep throat in the earth that had opened its valve beneath the road.

He reached down to touch the stone.

The water was extraordinarily cold. It did not feel like summer ditch-water, which was generally tepid and tasted of ditch-weed; it had the dead, numbing chill of well-water brought up from sixty fathoms in the winter months. And it was salt. When he lifted his fingers to his mouth, the taste was not the sweet brine of the sea, forty miles to the west, but a bitter, alkaline salt that left a coating of chalky grit upon his tongue, like alum or the scrapings of an old boiler.

"Mr. Pargeter."

Arthur scrambled to his feet so quickly that his elbow grazed the bark of the ash-pollard.

Old Mr. Clout was standing in the road behind him.

The attorney had not come by bicycle; he had come in a high two-wheeled gig with yellow spokes, drawn by an ancient grey cob that stood with its knees bent and its head hanging almost between its fetlocks. The leather apron of the gig was covered in mud-splashes, and Clout’s carpet-bag sat upon the seat beside an empty wicker hamper that smelled of dead cabbage.

Clout had his spectacles on—not the reading-glasses he used in court, but a pair of round, green-tinted goggles which he wore against the evening damp, giving him the appearance of a monstrous grasshopper that had outlived its season.

"You should be at your mutton, Mr. Pargeter," said the attorney, without taking his hands from the horsehair reins. "Mrs. Peake is a woman of regular habits. If she is kept waiting for her dish, she will speak to the Archdeacon’s registrar, and your name will not be mentioned when the deputy-clerkship falls vacant at Michaelmas."

"What is that stone?" Arthur asked, pointing down with an ink-stained finger into the ditch. The water had now covered the lowest of the three marks.

Clout tilted his head back, his green goggles reflecting the dying white light of the sky. "That? That is the thirty-first boundary of the tithing of Blackacre-cum-Moor. It was set up in the eleventh year of King Stephen by the monks of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, when they had the alien priory at the bridge-foot. Or perhaps it was set up by the heathen before them. It does not matter which. The point of law, Mr. Pargeter—which you would do well to consider before you take your final examination for the roll—is that it is not upon the county terrier."

"If it is an ancient boundary, it must be on the parish tithe-map," Arthur said. "I looked at the copy in the bishop’s registry only last month, when the drainage commissioners had their inquiry."

"You looked at the map of 1842," Clout whistled through his teeth, the grey cob shifting its weight with a squelch of its off-hind hoof. "The tithe commissioners were civil engineers from Newcastle. They had no eyes for anything that couldn't be drained with a three-inch pipe or sold to the railway company for an embankment. They drew their red lines through the bottom as if it were a deal board. But the bottom isn't deal, Mr. Pargeter. It’s marsh. And marsh has an awkward habit of remembering where its gutters were before the engineers were weaned."

"The judge told them to fill it," Arthur persisted. "He said Sir Henry would send the quarrymen."

Clout gave a short, whistling sound that might have been a chuckle or merely an escape of air from his shrunken throat.

"Sir Henry is at this moment drinking port wine with the High Sheriff at the county club," he said. "He has reached that time of life when a gentleman believes that an order given from the bench is the same thing as a work performed by the spade. He will forget the trenches until Monday morning, and by Monday morning the water will be three feet deep over the turnpike, from here to the nine-mile post."

"And the mail?"

"The mail will go round by the hills," said Clout, gently shaking the reins. The cob did not move, but merely twitched one tattered ear. "It will take two hours longer, and the sub-postmaster at Melbury will write three letters on blue paper to the Postmaster-General in London, and the Postmaster-General will send a clerk in a bowler hat down on the midday train to inspect the crossing. And by the time the bowler hat arrives, Mr. Pargeter, the seven days will be accomplished. The water will have gone down into the vents; the parishioners will have raked the gravel back into the holes; the stone will be six inches under the silt; and the clerk will write in his minute-book that the interruption was caused by an extraordinary flood due to the midsummer rains."

"It is not the midsummer rains," Arthur said. "It has barely rained three-quarters of an inch. The ditches in the town were dry at four o’clock."

Clout turned his green goggles slowly toward Arthur’s face. In the twilight, the attorney’s skin looked like an old bladder that had dried in a chimney.

"The law," said Clout, "does not inquire into the heavens when a satisfactory act of God can be found closer at hand. The midsummer rains have been entered upon the county vouchers since the year of the hard frost in ninety-five. It saves thirty pounds in surveyor's fees, and it prevents the freeholders of the hundred from asking why the road was built through the church-acre instead of round the gravel-pit."

"The church-acre?"

"The church-acre," Clout repeated. "The rector calls it the glebe, but it was never glebe. There was no church here until the fourth Edward, and then it was only a chantry for four old men to say prayers for the soul of a wool-stapler who had killed a King’s deer in the forest. The Acre was here before the church. It was here before the sheep. My grandfather had a parchment—it was among the things that went when the office in the Close was flooded in sixty-three—which called it Terra Inconcessa. The ungranted land."

"There is no land without a lord," Arthur cited, his legal training rising mechanically to the surface. "The fundamental maxim of the tenure—"

"The fundamental maxim of the tenure," Clout snapped, with more energy than he had shown during the whole sitting of the assize, "was invented by Norman ruffians who couldn't write their own names and had to hire French monks to forge their charters. There are five hundred acres in this county that never paid a hide-tax to the King nor a penny of Peter’s pence to the Pope. They don't belong to Sir Henry, they don't belong to the Crown, and they don't belong to the district council. They belong to the Acre."

"And Callow?"

"Callow is the tithing-man," Clout said, his voice dropping back into its normal, dry whistle. "His people have kept the ditch since the plague year. When the salt-well works, they let the water out through the bottom. If they don't let it out, it rises in the wells at the cottages, and the cows die of the rot. If they do let it out, the turnpike is drowned for seven days. It is very simple, Mr. Pargeter. It is so simple that twelve tradesmen from the town would never understand it, and Sir Austin Frayne would have thirty cottagers in the hulks for high treason before he had finished his second bottle of claret."

The old man jerked the reins with more decision. The cob gave a groan that sounded like a rusty pump, pulled its four feet out of the mud one by one with four distinct, hollow pops, and set off back toward the town, the high yellow wheels throwing up sprays of greasy grey water that smelled of sulphur.

Arthur remained standing by the ash-pollard.

The darkness had come down completely now. The rain had ceased, but the mist had risen from the rhines until it was waist-high, white and curdled like sheep-wash, through which the tops of the pollards stuck up like severed heads.

From the direction of the water-meadows, three-quarters of a mile away, came a sound.

It was not the sound of wagons, nor the shouting of drovers. It was a single, long-drawn note, low and vibrating, like the sound produced by blowing across the mouth of an enormous stone bottle. It rose and fell twice, steady, rhythmic, and perfectly flat, without the quaver of an ordinary horn. It seemed to come from the very level of the mud, where the rhines met the salt-well.

Arthur looked down at his feet.

The yellow water had crept over the road-metal. It had reached the rubber tyres of his bicycle; it was trickling through the spokes of the front wheel in thin, silent threads that carried upon their surface little flakes of grey foam, like dried yeast.

He did not wait to mount. He took the machine by the handlebars and backed down the lane, keeping his eyes on the grey stone until the mist closed over it. Even then, he could hear the water following him—not rushing, but sliding forward an inch at a time through the gravel, filling the hollows, smoothing the ruts, obliterating the tracks of Clout’s gig and the marks of his own rubber soles, until the lane looked no longer like a highway of His Majesty King George, but like a wide, grey creek through which the tide was slowly returning to a land that had forgotten the dry earth.

He reached the turnpike gate three miles back before he had the courage to look behind him.

To the west, the Bottom was a single, flat lake of white vapour, through which nothing showed except the black line of the hills three leagues away. There was no light; there was no smoke; there was only the cold, bitter smell of the salt-water, which had somehow traveled upon the wind as far as the second milestone, where the telegraph poles began their regular, civilized march toward the railway station and the Shire Hall.

Arthur unstrapped his canvas satchel, his fingers shaking so that he could barely undo the brass buckles.

He did not touch the hard-boiled eggs. He drew out the blue marbled notebook, laid it upon the saddle of the Sunbeam beneath the yellow glare of the acetylene road-lamp, and opened it to the page he had blotted two hours before.

The ink was black and dry now.

Beneath the four names of the men in the frieze coats, he wrote three words, pressing the pencil so hard against the cheap wood-pulp paper that the lead broke against the margin:

Terra Inconcessa. 1923.

As he closed the book, the town clock in the distance began to toll nine. It was the hour at which the hall-keeper at the Shire Hall went round with his long pole to turn off the gas-jets in the corridors, leaving the great calf ledgers in their locked cupboards to sleep under seventy years of dust, while three miles out in the dark, the grey stone sank deeper and deeper into the bitter water that was not on the map.