"Then tell me what to look for," she said, "and I'll look."
They worked all night.
The fen men came out of the dark in ones and twos, lanterns bobbing along the drove tops, until there were thirty of them, and boys, and women too, Bet Scarth among them. Ivo stood by the boil and told them what he needed, and they did it. Not to stop the water—you could not stop it, he said; if you plugged the hole the river would only push through somewhere else—but to ring it round with a wall of sacks and clay, three feet high, so that the water rose inside the ring and pushed back down against itself, and came up slower, and carried less of the bank away with it.
And all night she was his eyes.
"It's rising inside the ring," she would say, at his elbow, holding the lantern low. "Six inches. Still brown. Less brown than before—the colour of weak tea now, not strong." And later: "There's another one. Twenty yards down. Small. About the size of a hand. Clear." And later still, with a catch in her voice: "The bank face is wet higher up, there, above the first one, a dark patch the size of a door. Can you see it? No. It's shining. It's wet through."
He made them build a second ring and a third, and a long low berm of clay against the foot of the wet patch to weight it down. He went up and down the line with his hand on her shoulder, and she told him where to put his feet. The engine beat on behind them, never faltering, never hurrying, and every time he lifted his head he could see its windows, the only thing in that whole black world his eyes would give him: a row of long golden lights, and the shadow of the beam going up and down across them, slow as breathing.
Some time after three, when the water inside the first ring had stopped climbing and the colour had gone from tea to something nearly clear, Jethro Scarth came and stood beside them in the dark with a full sack on his shoulder.
"It was Tench," he said, not to Ivo. To her. "Thursday. After the church. Came to the cottage and said Sir Digby would have the fen, codicil or no codicil, lawyers' work, it'd take a year, and when he had it the engine'd be sold and the first cottage pulled down would be mine, with Bet and the little 'un and her chest so bad. Unless I helped. He read me a paper. Said it was only to say I'd been at the church and seen the wedding. I put my mark to it. It was only after, Bet's sister that can read, she told me what they were saying in the village, what was in it." His voice cracked. "I never said His Grace didn't know me. He asked after Joss's chest. He called me Jethro. He said I was the most important of the three."
"I know," said Rosamund. "I know he did."
"I'll swear it. Before any judge in England. Let 'em pull the cottage down."
"Nobody," said Ivo, "is going to pull anything down." He found that he meant it with a force that surprised him. "Put that sack on the second ring, Scarth. The low side. She'll show you."