Chapter 19 The Choice

She did not tell him, because Honoria had told her not to, and because she had begun to understand that Honoria did nothing without a reason and that the reason might be the one thing standing between Severin Withergrave and the water. But she could not keep it from him, and in the end she did not have to, because he read her the way he read the books of the estate, and on the second-to-last evening of the year he came to her door and stood in the corridor with a lamp and said, You have been to the Room of Years. She let him in. The room was cold and the window was frosted and the tide was making its long slow sound below the house. I have been, she said. I read the book. I read the footnote you wrote in it, and the three leaves that were added after, and the scheme at the back, and I took the leaves out and I have them, and I have read the whole of it. He stood by the window with the lamp and did not look at her. Then you know what the last night of the year is. I know what they intend it to be, she said. And what do you intend it to be, he said. She came and stood beside him at the cold glass. Below them the flats lay white under the winter moon and the tide was out and the stakes stood in rows across the silver, patient as the house. I intend to say no, she said. Out loud, in front of the district and the house and Honoria, on the last night, with the cloth in your hands. That is what you offered me once, in the low room, and I have decided to take it. He turned then, and in the lamplight his face was not still at all. If you say no, he said, the contract fails. The debt stands. Your mother comes home from Wexley, and your brother goes to the docks, and the house keeps Ilsabeth and keeps Merisel and keeps me, and the account goes on being paid out of me until there is nothing left, and you go down the hill with nothing to show for a year of your life but the truth, which will not feed anyone. I know, she said. You cannot have thought it through, he said. I have thought of nothing else for three days, she said. She took the folded leaves out of her dress and held them up. I have the scheme of the man who made the debt, and I have the bond of the winter I was born, and I have the leaves of a book that shows three men went into the water and the house called it a translation. And I have one more thing, which is the only thing that matters, and it is not paper and it is not a rule. It is the fact that the account, whatever you believe about the sea, has been for thirty years partly a fraud run by Lodegrave out of a room with a black book in it, and a fraud is a thing you can take to a court on the mainland, and a court is a thing that does not believe in a book three hundred years old, and the day the district hears that the house has been kept alive by a solicitor's arithmetic is the day the district stops being afraid of the Keeper and starts asking him questions. Severin looked at her for a long time. And if it is not only a fraud, he said. If the account is what the book says it is, and the last night comes, and I am called, and the water wants its Keeper. Then you will not go into the water, she said. You will stand in that room and you will hold the cloth, and you will do exactly as I say, and you will let me do the thing that brides are for. Because I have read the book, and the book says the Keeper is released when the heir is confirmed, and it does not say the Keeper is confirmed by dying. It says what the house chooses to read into it, and the house is a very old woman and a very tired man and a scheme in the back of a book, and I am the last piece of paper in this house and I have decided how I am going to be read. He did not answer for a long moment. The lamp burned steady between them and the frost crept on the glass and somewhere below the house the tide turned and began to come in, and when he spoke at last his voice was low and had a roughness in it she had not heard before. Then tell me what to do, he said, and I will do it, because I have kept the rules of this house for eleven years and paid for them out of my own skin and never once, in all of it, been given a single thing to keep that I chose. He looked at her, and in the lamplight he was young and tired and, for the first time since she had known him, unguarded. Whatever it is you have decided to do, choose me. Choose me on purpose. That is the only thing I will ask of you, and you do not have to answer it tonight. She thought about his words for the rest of the night and all the next day. Choose me. It was the only thing he had ever asked her for, in a year of his asking her for nothing, and it had come out of him at the worst possible moment, when the house was a day from its last night and she had nothing to give anyone but a plan and a stolen leaf and a refusal. She had come up this hill to save her mother and her brother, and she had saved them, and the year was almost out, and there was no column in her arithmetic in which the man at the window was anything but the instrument of the house that had bought her. Yet she stood at the frosted glass and looked at the flats and could not make herself believe it, because the instrument of a house does not walk down a hill at night to pay a poor woman's bill, and does not add a footnote to a book to warn a bride, and does not ask to be chosen like a man and not a rule. She thought about what her mother had said in the cottage, near the end, when the fever had made her plain. Everyone in this house is paying something to somebody, she had said. The old woman pays the dead. The soft man pays nothing and takes everything. And the keeper pays the house, and one day the house will ask him for the last of it. Romilly had not understood it then. She understood it now, standing at the frosted glass with the tide turning under the house, and she knew which of the two the house had chosen, and she knew what she was going to do about it, and she knew the price of doing it would be the whole of the year of her life. She looked up at him in the cold room with the tide coming in below and the last night of the year coming up the hill, and she did not answer it that night, and she did not have to, because he could read her the way he read the books of the estate, and both of them knew, standing at that frosted window, what the last night of the year was going to be. ---