IX.
Dawn came up grey and very slow, and showed them a scarred and trampled field, three rings of sodden sacks, a long brown berm, and the Barrier Bank still standing.
The river had crested a little before five. Rosamund had seen it first, by the gauge post at the wheel house—"It's not moving. It was fourteen and two inches at four and it's fourteen and two inches now"—and the word had gone down the line of lanterns, and someone had laughed out loud, and someone else had started to cry. The engine had beaten on. By six the boils had slowed to a weeping of clear water. By seven the fen men had gone home to sleep, one by one, touching their caps as they passed, to her first and then to him.
The two of them sat on an upturned barrow at the top of the bank with Bet Scarth's tea going cold in their hands and watched the light come up over the river.
He could see again. Not well; the edges were still soft, and the far bank was a line of brown smudge. But in the grey morning, sitting beside her, he could see her: the mud to her knees, the ruined black skirts, the hair come completely down and hanging in a dark wet rope over one shoulder, the face grey with tiredness and smeared with clay. She had lost the signet ring at some point in the night and found it again in the mud of the second ring and now wore it on a bit of twine round her neck.
"Badajoz," he said.
She did not look at him. "I wondered."
"April of 'twelve. The night of the breaches. We'd a mine under the Trinidad bastion, the French had a countermine, and somebody's slow-match was quicker than ours." He turned the cup in his hands. "I was perhaps four yards from it. It didn't burn the eyes, the surgeons said, only the—something at the back of them. I was blind for a fortnight. Then it came back. Most of it. Since then it's been going, a little at a time. The edges first. Then the dark. Lockyer—that was the surgeon—said it might be ten years, or five, or twenty. He was honest; he said he didn't know. He said that in the end I shall very likely see light and shadow and nothing else."
"Who knows?"
"Lockyer. Now you. No one else. I've built roads for five years by walking every yard of them in daylight and memorising it. I have my clerk read me the estimates. I tell him I've a weak head for figures." He laughed shortly. "I thought, when I came here, I'd see the old man and say what I came to say and go back north, and that would be the last time I'd see Ellerholt. I thought it might be the last time I'd see it at all, the way I remember it."
"I knew," she said, "in the vestry."