Chapter 5: The One That Fails

She began the reading the night she signed for it, because the quarter session would not wait and neither would she. The materials went out across the desk in the order her father would have set them: the certified extracts, twelve leaves, the strong plain hand. Her own memory of the county plats, which she had copied at seventeen and carried out of a fire at twenty and could have redrawn blind. The commission, paragraph four and all. And the problem itself, which was this: the Marsh grant had a corner, and the corner was gone. It had been a set stone on high footing above the beck, placed forty years back and sworn by three witnesses, all of whom were now in the churchyard, which was Corver's whole case in one sentence. The Cracking had taken the stone and rearranged the slope it stood on, and nobody had re-set it in the year since, because where the stone should be re-set was precisely the argument, and arguments do not carry chain. So she re-established it, the way the work is done. She triangulated from the three surviving marks: the bench cut at Pilcher's rise, the mill weir mark, the Aldern stone. She ran the traverse, and closed it, and ran it again from the far end, and closed it again. She checked her figures against her father's fair copy of the original survey and the two sets of numbers met across forty years with a thumb's width between them, which is what happens when two careful people never admit an honest error into the space that separates them. The corner came out on the old footing above the beck, eleven yards north of where the slope now pretended things had always been. The corner sat where she set it,…