Chapter 6 The Payment

He came for her at the last light the next evening, and he did not knock, and she was already dressed and waiting, because she had spent the whole day turning his words over and had come to the end of her turning. Follow me, he said, and do not speak, and do not look at the walls. He led her down a stair she had not found, past the kitchens and the cellars and a door of iron set in stone, and beyond that door the air changed and grew cold and wet and old, and the floor became flags worn smooth by centuries of feet, and the walls streamed with a thin wet shine, and the smell of salt grew so strong that it sat on the back of her tongue like the taste of the sea. She did not look at the walls. She would learn, later, that there was nothing on them to see, and that he had told her not to look because a person who looks at nothing is a person who is thinking about something, and he had wanted her thinking, that night, to be about him. They came into a low round room beneath the house, and in it there was a lamp and a table and a stone shelf that ran the whole length of the wall, and on the shelf there were twenty-seven small doors, each one iron, each one numbered in brass. She understood what they were before she understood that she understood, and then her stomach went cold and she looked at the Keeper and said, without meaning to, Are these the Withergraves. All of them, he said, since the first. That is what Honoria means when she says the house keeps its dead. They are not in the chapel and they are not in the churchyard. They are here, in the wall, where the tide touches the stone twice a day, and the two things this house has always believed are these: that the sea takes back what the land gives, and that a Withergrave kept above the water will not lie quiet. So we keep them below it. And every evening, at the last light, the door between the house and the water is closed, and the closing of it is the payment, and the payment is mine. She looked at the numbered doors and counted them without meaning to, and then she counted them again, because there were twenty-seven, and she had heard that the Withergraves were a family of three hundred years, and twenty-seven was not enough and was also too many. What is the payment, she said. He set the lamp on the table. You will see, he said. Stand there, out of the light, and when I ask you for the cloth, bring me the cloth, and do not speak, and whatever you hear, do not answer it. She stood out of the light with her back to the wet stone and her hands folded, and she watched the Keeper of Withergrave stand before the wall of doors, and he spoke. It was not a prayer and it was not a poem and it was not, so far as she could tell, words at all in the usual sense. He spoke names, slowly, one for each door, and after each name he was silent for the space of three breaths, and then he spoke the next. Some of the names she knew from the village and some she did not and one of them, near the end, was Ilsabeth, and when he spoke that name his voice changed so slightly that she would not have caught it if she had not spent the past week learning the exact grain of his silence. And as he spoke the tide came in over the flats above them, and the water pressed at the stones, and the stones answered, and the whole low room filled with a sound like a held breath, and the hair on Romilly's arms stood up, and she did not speak, and she did not answer anything, because by then she had begun to be afraid of what she might answer. When it was done he asked for the cloth, and she brought him the cloth, the long pale folded thing she had seen on the table the night before, and he unwrapped it in the lamplight and she saw that it was covered in names. Names in thread, hundreds of them, the old ones gone brown, the new ones still white, stitched edge to edge and row to row, and at the bottom, alone, in fresh thread, there was one name with no stitch beyond it. Romilly, it said. She looked at her own name stitched in the cloth of a house she had belonged to for six days, and she felt the room tilt. What is this, she said. The register of the house, he said. Every name it has bound. The names above the fold are the blood. The names below the fold are the brides. He folded the cloth and did not meet her eyes. Your name was sewn the day the contract was signed. That is what a marriage into this house is. It is a name added to a cloth, and a debt forgiven, and an evening at the wall. And what happened to the other brides, she said. She said it fast, before the rules could stop her, because the rules were his and she was past caring. How many names are below the fold, and where did the women go, and why does the village say none of them ever came back down the hill. He was silent for a long time. The tide worked at the stones. Somewhere above them the house creaked and settled, and the lamp guttered and stood straight again, and when he answered he answered only the last part of her question, which she would learn was his way of answering the part he could bear. Because the house does not let a bride go, he said, until the Confirming. That is the eighth rule. And when you ask the village why none of them came back, you are asking why none of them finished what they came here to finish. He turned and picked up the lamp, and his face in its light was set and still and gave her nothing, and he said, That is all I will say tonight, and he led her back up the stair past the iron door and into the warm part of the house, and he did not tell her to go to her room, and she did not ask to. She had counted the doors three times and the number had not changed. Twenty-seven. She had counted the names on the cloth until the lamplight gave out, and she had stopped when she reached her own, because a woman who counts her own name in a register of the dead is a woman who has already begun to believe the register. She stood at the foot of the main stair with her arms wrapped around herself and she thought about the twenty-seven doors and the one name stitched alone at the bottom of the cloth, and about a father who owed money to a house for eleven years and never asked why, and about a mother who had said, in the flat voice of a woman who had stopped hoping for anything, that the things the Withergraves kept were not the kind of things you bargain with. And for the first time since she had walked up the eastern rise, Romilly Draycott was not afraid of the house. She was afraid of the one clean, simple fact she had learned down there in the dark, that she was not the first, and she was afraid that she would not be the last, and she was afraid—most of all, in a way she could not have explained—of the way the Keeper of Withergrave had said the name Ilsabeth. ---