Chapter 15 The Letter from Home

The letter came in the black week after the feast, when the marsh froze at the edges and the flats went white and hard and the house grew colder than stone, and Romilly knew it was bad before she opened it because it was written in Amias's careful young hand and Amias never wrote with care unless he was afraid. Mother has had a bad turn, it said. She has been in the bed four days and the doctor came and said she must go to Wexley now, not in the spring, and Mr. Lodegrave came to the house and said the estate will not pay for the winter bed, and that the arrangement was for the spring, and that any earlier would be a new arrangement, and that a new arrangement must be discussed with the mistress of Withergrave, and that you must come down the hill and ask her, Romilly, because he will not write and he will not come up the hill and he says you must come down. Mother says do not come. Mother says whatever you do, do not come down the hill in the winter. But she is sick, Romilly, and I do not know what to do, and I am sorry to write it this way and I am sorry. Romilly read it three times. Then she put on her coat and went to find Honoria, because a rule is a rule but a rule is not a mother, and she had decided on the way down the stair that she would break this one if she had to. Honoria was in the great room, and Lodegrave was with her. She understood the whole of it the moment she saw them together, the round soft man and the old straight woman at the same table with the same fire behind them, and she understood that the letter had been designed and the day had been picked and the trap had been set, and that it was not Lodegrave's trap alone. She stood in the door with the letter in her hand and said, before either of them could speak, You want me to come down the hill. Honoria looked at her with the dry flat gaze that had never once softened. We want the thing that is on the table, she said. We want the Confirming done, and the heir named, and the name secured, and the account closed. You have been in this house three months. The year will not run its course in comfort if you spend it making enemies of the two people who hold it. What is in the letter, Romilly said, is my mother dying in a bed while you play at arrangements. What is in the letter, Lodegrave said, in his mild soft voice, is a payment that was made on terms, and terms that are met with terms, and a bride who was told that the purse of this estate answers to the rules of this estate, and who has since learned, I think, that the rules answer to the mistress. He folded his soft hands. The sanatorium bed can be arranged for tomorrow. It can be arranged tonight. It can be arranged for the spring, or for never. That is not cruelty, Miss Draycott. That is arithmetic. Romilly looked at him and understood, in that moment, more about the history of this house than any book had told her. It was all in the way he said arithmetic. She had grown up in a village of fishermen who paid their debts in coin and in kind and in the work of their hands, and she had grown up knowing a different arithmetic, the arithmetic of mercy, which balances a large sum against a small one and writes down what is left. Lodegrave had no such arithmetic. He had only the other kind, the kind that balances a sum against a sum and finds the remainder and calls it business, and she understood that a man like that, given the purse of an old and failing house and a rule that said the house must take brides and a family too proud to ask why, would find a great many remainders to keep. She stood in the door with the letter in her hand and the cold still on her coat and looked at the two of them at the black table, and a small clean rage went through her and left her steadier than fear had ever made her. She had spent a year being handed papers and told to sign them. She had spent a year being told what the rules were and what the arithmetic was and what the house required, and every time she had believed that the paper in her hand was the smallest thing in the room. She understood now, standing in a doorway between a frozen marsh and a warm fire, that the paper was never the smallest thing. A paper was the only thing in that house that could outlive the people who had signed it, and the two of them at the table had built their whole lives on paper, and had forgotten, the way people who build on paper always forget, that paper can be read. She looked at Lodegrave and thought that she had never in her life hated a soft man before. She had hated hard men, men who hit and men who drank and men who took a mended net and left a debt no one could name. But a soft man who did it with a pen and a folded hand and a word like arithmetic was a thing the district had no answer for, and she understood now why her father had come home white from this hall and said nothing. There is no village in the world with a rope long enough to reach a man in a warm office. She turned to Honoria. Then let me ask the mistress of the house one plain question, she said, and if she answers it, I will write the letter tonight and do whatever the house asks. Ask it, Honoria said. What was my father's two hundred pounds for, Romilly said. He borrowed it the winter I was born. He never spent it. He repaid nothing and the estate never called it and he never once asked why, and he made my mother promise we would never take anything from this house. Tell me what a poor fisherman was paid two hundred pounds for, in the winter I was born, by a house that has been buying brides for three hundred years. The room went very quiet. Lodegrave's soft hands stopped moving. And Honoria, the last of the true blood of Withergrave, the woman who had never once in her life been hurried, sat looking at Romilly for a long moment with something on her face that Romilly had never seen there and could not name, and then she said, in a voice that had gone thin and careful, Who told you about the winter you were born. No one, Romilly said. That is the point. She put the letter down on the black table between them. I am going to my mother, she said. I am going down the hill tonight, and I am going to sit with her, and I am going to come back up, and when I come back up I am going to open the Room of Years, and whatever rule stands in my way, I will have the whole of the truth out of it, because I have been sold, and lied to, and used for arithmetic by two people who have never once told me a true thing, and I am finished with it. She picked the letter up again. Tell the Keeper where I have gone, she said. He will know what to do with a broken rule. ---