And on the 12th of July, Verity began on the atlas. It took her 12 days. It was a folio of 1738, the survey of the manors of Old Tarn, Holland Edge, and Nether Old Tarn made for the third Duke. 41 hand-colored plates, 212 leaves of text and terrier in oak boards a half inch thick, covered in Russia leather that had gone the color of a dead leaf. It had stood on the floor of the third bay for 2 years with its bottom edge in the wet. She opened it the way you take a splinter out of a child's hand, which is to say slowly and from underneath, and with a great deal of talking to yourself.
The board came away on the eighth day. Under the board, where the pastedown had lifted, there was paper. And under the paper, there was not paper at all, but parchment, three strips of it, brown and brittle, sewn in by the binder to strengthen the joint. Verity sat back on her stool and looked at it for a long time.
Every binder knows what it is. Old parchment was tough, and it was cheap. When the trade wanted a lining for a spine or a stiffener for a board, it took whatever was in the shop and cut it up. A psalter, a rent roll, somebody's grandfather's deed. There were probably a thousand books in England with a piece of the 16th century glued down inside the cover of the 18th.
She lifted the first strip with the point of her folder and turned it over and read the four lines that ran across it in a clear secretary hand. She read them again. Then she got up and shut the library door, which she had never done before in 7 months. She came back to the table, sat down, and put her hands flat on either side of the book, as if it might get up and go somewhere.
What was written on the three strips was this:
"An indenture made the 25th day of March in the 11th year of the reign of King George II. Between the most noble Hugo, Duke of Glenn Moore of the one part and one Peter Halloway of Winderby, lime burner of the other part. And by it the said Duke did demise. Grant and to farm let unto the said Peter Halloway all those his quarries of limestone at Holland Edge with the three kilns the way leaves and the wharf to hold for the term of four score years yielding therefore the yearly rent of £11 and one load of lime."
Four score years from the 25th of March 1738. Verity did the sum four times on four separate evenings because a sum you want to come out is a sum you should not trust. 80 years from Lady Day 1738 ended on Lady Day 1818. That was the 25th of March last in the same week that a man had come from Winderby with a pistol case to shoot an old horse at Old T.
It was an article of faith that the Holland Edge quarries had been sold out of the family long ago. Mr. Sket said so. The rental said so in a hand of about 1790 in a marginal note, "Hollen Edge, alienated, not of this estate." Lady Perpetual said so too. Verity asked her on a Friday afternoon in the most careless voice she could manage and was told that her grandfather had sold the whole of that ground for a song. The family had been laughed at for it for 60 years.
And meanwhile the Winderby and Kirkstead Lime Company burned 20,000 tons a year off the edge of the moor and had cut a wharf on the new canal to do it. All that time the company had been paying £11 a year and one load of lime into the old tarn rental under the heading 'quit rent ancient'. Nobody had ever asked what the £11 was for. It came in. It went into the column. It was nothing and it was proof and it had been sitting in the estate books in Mr. Ski's own hand for 30 years.
Verity did not go to the Duke. She went on her half day on the 8th of September, 12 mi in a carrier's cart to Winderby to the office of Mr. Tunnacliffe in Bridge Street, who had been her father's customer for 20 years, and who still had on his shelf 40 volumes of Sessions papers in Isaac Thornburn's binding. She put the strips on his desk between two sheets of card. She did not tell him whose they were until he had read them.
Mr. Tunnacliffe read them twice, took off his spectacles, and looked at her for rather a long time. "Where is the counterpart?"
"That is the counterpart, sir, or a third of it. It was cut up for binders waste in about 1740 and sewn into the joints of a book in the same house."
"By whom?"
"By a binder who was given a bundle of old skins and told to get on with it," said Verity. "It happens every day of the week. It has happened to half the deeds in England. And the book is the estate's own atlas. It has never left the house."
Mr. Tunnacliffe put his spectacles back on. "Then you have brought me," he said, "a piece of parchment which says that a duke let a quarry for 80 years at a time when everybody now living believes that he sold it. The lease has run out this spring. If there is nothing else, no deed of sale, no release, no fine levied, then the quarries, the kilns, the way and the wharf came back to the old tarn estate on Lady Day. The Winderby and Kirkstead lime company have been trespassers since March on the tonnage they are burning. That ground is worth somewhere between £800 and £1,000 a year to whoever owns it."
Verity found that she had to sit down and that there was no chair, so she stood still instead.
"It must be searched," Mr. Tunnliffe said. "There will be an enrollment or there will not. That is 3 weeks and about six guineas. And it must be done by somebody instructed by the Duke and not by a young woman with a bundle in a piece of card. Do you see that?"
"I see it."
"Does his grace know?"
"No, sir."
"Why in the name of goodness not?"
Verity looked at the strips lying on the desk in the September light. "Because he is to be married at Michaelmas," she said, "and I did not wish to put a thing in his hands that I had not made sure of. He has had a great deal put in his hands by people who had not made sure."
She walked up to the top of Bridge Street afterwards and stood outside the shop that had been her father's, which now sold hats. After that, she went round to her mother's cousins and sat for an hour with Matthew. He was full of the new cut and the fall of the ground at the lime wharf, and he had grown 2 ines since June. At the door he asked her in the flat way boys ask things they have decided not to want, whether there was any news of the 200 guineas.
"Not yet," said Verity.
"No," he said. "Well, and then because he was 16 and could not help himself, it's only that Mr. Atwood says the engineer takes his boys in the spring."