Chapter 10 The Settling

The winter turning came in the last week of the old year, and the house prepared for it the way a body prepares for winter, quietly and from the inside out. For three days the servants carried things up from the cellars: candles by the dozen, bottles of dark wine, salt in shallow bowls, and linen, great folds of it, all of it old and all of it the color of bone. For three days Mrs. Pye would not meet Romilly's eye. For three days Honoria sat in the great room with a ledger on her knees and read it with a magnifier and made small marks with a pencil and said nothing to anyone. And on the third day the Keeper of Withergrave came to Romilly's door at noon, which he had never done, and said, Tonight is the Settling. You will stand with me and you will do as I say. And if the house asks you a question, you will not answer it. You will look at me, and I will answer for you. She said she understood. She did not. She had learned by then that in Withergrave there were two kinds of not understanding, the kind you could fix with questions and the kind you could only fix by living through, and this was the second kind. They gathered at the last light in the great room, and there were more of them than Romilly had ever seen in one place: not only the household but faces she did not know, dark-clothed and silent, come up the hill from Marrowgate and from the farms along the marsh, people who bowed to Honoria and did not look at Romilly and stood along the walls like shadows that had been given bodies for the evening. The bell in the chapel rang. The doors of the house closed. And the Settling began. Honoria read from the ledger. It was a record of years, and she read one line for each year she had stood in this room, and the lines were short and plain and terrible. The name of the year's dead. The name of the year's birth, if there had been one, which there had not been for a long time. And then the name of the house's binding, which was the name of the bride, and this year, when she came to it, she read a name that was not Romilly's at all. Ilsabeth Withergrave, she read. And then, after a pause that went on a heartbeat too long: and Romilly Draycott. The room did not move. Romilly felt the Keeper go still beside her, and she did not look at him, because he had told her to look at him only if the house asked her a question, and the house had not asked her a question yet. Honoria closed the ledger and set it on the table and said, Bring the cloth. They brought the cloth. Two servants carried it between them, unfolded, and it was longer than Romilly had known, longer by half, and it was held up before the fire and the firelight ran along the rows and rows of names, hundreds of them, so many that the bottom of the cloth, where the new names were, looked like a field of white. And on the cloth, beside her own name, stitched in thread that matched, there was a third name she had not seen, a name that should not have been on any cloth of brides, a small name in small letters, made to look like part of the stitching and made to be missed. Merisel. Romilly read it and did not understand it and could not stop reading it. The name was small and neat and fresh, the thread still bright, and beneath it there was a blank space, the only blank space on the whole of the cloth, as if the person who had sewn the row had been interrupted, or had run out of thread, or had known there was someone still to come. Then the door at the far end of the great room opened, and a woman Romilly had never seen came in leading a child by the hand. The child was small, six or seven, and dressed in the plain dark clothes of the household, and she walked with her head down and her free hand trailing the wall, the way a child walks through a room of grown strangers. But it was not the child that made Romilly's heart turn over. It was the reaction. The room, which had been a wall of silent shadows, moved. Some of the faces along the walls flinched. Some of them crossed themselves. Old Crispin put a hand over his mouth. And Honoria, the last of the true blood, stood very straight at the table with her magnifier in her hand and her eyes fixed on the child with a hunger so plain and so cold that Romilly took a step backward before she knew she had moved. The Keeper of Withergrave stepped in front of her and put his hand on her arm, and his hand was shaking. It was the first time she had ever felt him shake. Do not ask, he said, very low, so that only she could hear. Whatever you are about to ask, do not ask it in this room. She looked past him at the child, who had lifted her head at last and was looking straight back at Romilly across the length of the great room. The girl had pale green eyes. She had the same pale green eyes as the man whose hand was shaking on Romilly's arm, and the same narrow stillness, and the same way of holding her chin as if she were deciding whether the room deserved her. The bell rang once. The cloth was folded. The fire was banked. And the Settling was over, and the guests went down the hill into the dark, and the doors of the house opened one by one, and the child was taken away by the woman, and Romilly stood in the emptying room beside the Keeper of Withergrave and said, in a voice she barely recognized as her own, Who is she. She stood in the middle of the empty room and held the name in her hands like something hot. Merisel. It was a name stitched to look like part of the border, sewn into a cloth of brides by a hand that had wanted it found and had wanted it hidden, and she thought of the empty hooks in the gallery where a portrait had hung and been taken down, and of a laughing woman who had died six weeks before her Confirming and had never once been painted at her funeral, and of the way the Keeper's hand had shaken on her arm at the sight of a child. She did not yet have the whole of it. She had the shape of it, and the shape was a circle, and in the middle of the circle stood a girl of seven with pale green eyes and a name in a register that the house would not read aloud. He did not answer. He looked at the place where the child had stood, and then he looked at her, and in the low light of the banked fire his face was not cold at all. It was a man's face, and it was tired, and it was afraid. She died in her first year, he said, six weeks before her Confirming. That is what they told the village. That is what they told me. And then he walked out of the room, and left her standing alone among the folded chairs and the spent candles, with a name in her head like a lit match, and the beginning of an understanding she did not want. ---