Chapter 1 Michaelmas in the Scriptorium

By the feast of Saint Michael the harvest was in and the rents were paid, and the north light that came through the scriptorium window had begun to thin and cool. Aldith worked with her sleeves pinned above the elbow and her hair bound in linen, because gold leaf would not lie flat on a stray hair, and because a woman's loose hair made even the chaplain uneasy behind a closed door. The room was called a chamber only by courtesy. It had been a cell once, then a store for salt fish, and now it held two sloping benches, a cupboard, a stone shelf, and an old chest that had long ago lost its lid. On the shelf stood horns and oyster shells and small clay cups, each holding a colour. Vermilion, ground from the lump and bound with egg glair and a little gum. Orpiment, which she handled with a cloth over her thumb, since it was a poison and would climb into any cut. A blue she hoarded like coin, scraped from a cake of stone into warm water, thickening at last into something deeper than the sky. Verdigris, green as old bronze, made by hanging copper over sour wine. Lead white, heavy and sweet-smelling, which she never licked from the brush no matter how fine the point. There was woad and madder and kermes, buckthorn and saffron, and a little shell of lampblack that she had gathered herself from the chimney of the guest-hall hearth. Ink she made in the hall below, in a crock, steeping oak galls in water with filings of iron and a knob of gum. The first day it looked like weak tea. The second it darkened. By the third it was black enough to bite the parchment, and it would keep its colour for a hundred years and then begin, slowly, to fade to a warm brown, the way the pages of the old cartulary had faded. She cut her own quills from goose feathers taken from the kitchen's Christmas stock, and she had ruined four that morning getting the nib right. Too long a slit and the pen spat. Too short and it scratched. She wanted a pen that would write a small, even hand for the length of a psalm without being dipped, and she had not found it yet. Tibba, the novice who fetched and carried and was learning to rule lines, sat at the second bench with the pricking awl, making a row of tiny holes down the margin of a fresh sheet. The holes would guide the ruled lines. Every line on every page of every book in the house began as a hole pricked by a girl's hand. "You lean on it," Aldith said, not looking up. "The awl. You are pressing so hard the holes go through to the next leaf." Tibba sat back. "Mother Wymarc says it must be straight." "Straight, yes. Not deep. A deep hole is a hole in the wrong page, and the wrong page is the one we sell." She set down her pen and took the awl and showed her, the point turning, the pressure no more than a breath. "Like striking a flint for the first time. Firm enough to bite. Not enough to break the stone." The girl nodded and tried again, and Aldith went back to the book before her, which was not a book yet but a bundle of gatherings, folded and nested and waiting to be sewn. It was the new cartulary, the register of the house's charters and deeds, and the making of it was the reason she had work that winter and bread on her table. The old cartulary, propped open on the sloping bench, was dying. Worms had walked through its lower quires in long galleries. The ink had faded to the colour of weak broth. Its covering board had warped so badly that the leaves stood open at the middle like a bird's wings, and once, in the spring, she had found a family of silverfish living in the spine. "The house should have copied it years ago," she had told the prioress, and Prioress Wymarc, who was then sixty and had been prioress for nineteen of those years, had agreed with a small, tired motion of her hand. "The house should have done a great many things years ago," she had said. "We do them now." So Aldith copied. She copied slowly and with her whole attention, because a cartulary was not a psalter to be admired; it was the memory of the house's lands, and a wrong word in it could be a field lost or a mill given away. A charter copied was a charter kept. She had copied the foundation of the house and the grants of the two Rushbourne tofts and the gift of the salt-pans at the marsh mouth, and she had copied the small things too, the half-acre here, the right to gather reeds there, because the small things were the ones that quarrels were made of. At noon a man came from the village with a deed to be written, and she laid the cartulary aside and took the deed. His name was Hervey, and he was her husband's brother, a broad, patient man who traded in hides and wool and parchment, and who was the nearest thing to family she had left. He wanted a lease drawn: two acres of the town field, from him to a tenant, for seven years, at a rent of ninepence and a hen at Christmas. "You know what it says," he told her, because he could not read it himself. "You wrote the last one." "I know what the last one said," she said. "This one I will read to you before you seal it. Every word. And you will put your hand on the cross and say it is yours." He did. She read it back to him in the plainest words she had, twice, because once was never enough, and he touched the little cross she had drawn at the foot and made his mark, and she wrote beside the mark, *Hervey of Rushbourne, who cannot write*, and set her own name under that, *Aldith, scribe, of this writing*, and sealed it with a thread of his wool pressed into the green wax. When he had gone she sat a while with her hands flat on the bench, the way she did after sealing a deed, as if the document needed settling like new mortar. She could write a man's whole case for him, and set it down so that a court three counties off would read it and act on it. She could not stand in that court and be believed on her own account. A woman's word was worth a halfpenny in most courts and less in some, and a scribe's word was worth whatever the man who paid for it was worth. She had learned young to put her faith in the thing written and not the one writing. The pen outlived the witness. The parchment sat still and was read. That afternoon Godith came up, the oldest nun in the house, who kept the sacristy and the relics and the keys, and who moved at the pace of a clock that had stopped. She carried a strip of parchment on which the list of the house's precious things was written, and she and Aldith went over it together, the way they did each quarter, so that the list would be true. "A silver-gilt chalice," Godith said. "The paten. Two candlesticks. The cross of the Holy Wood, with the relic set in it." "The cross has lost a stone." "It has. Since Candlemas. I have looked for it." Godith's eyes, which were the pale grey of the fen in winter, went to the window. "And the chest." "The chest of charters." "That one." She said it flatly, and then she said nothing more, and Aldith, who had known her eleven years, understood that the old woman had come upstairs to say a thing and had thought better of it, or had been told not to. "What of the chest, Mother?" "Ask the prioress," Godith said. "It is not mine to say." And she went down again, one stair at a time, her hand on the wall. Aldith turned back to the cartulary, more unsettled than the words deserved, and because she was unsettled she did what she always did, which was work. She took up the old book and opened it at the foundation, the first great charter of the house, by which the lord of Wetherlaw a hundred years before had given the fen and the mill to God and to the nuns of Nethmarsh. It stood at the head of the register, in the largest hand the old copyist had known, with a great initial A painted round and blue and touched with gold, and the words running out from it in a long even line. She had read this charter a hundred times. She could have said it in her sleep, the names, the bounds, the four witnesses, the clause at the end that mattered more than all the rest: *in free, pure and perpetual alms*. Free alms. Not a lease, not a loan, not a gift for a term of years, but the land given outright to God, and no heir of the giver could ever take it back. She was tracing the initial A with her eyes, the way a mason runs his thumb along a wall to feel where the mortar is new, when she saw it. Under the blue, at the edge of the gold, the parchment had a shine that the rest of the leaf did not have. It was smooth there, and slightly raised, and when she tilted the leaf toward the light the way she tilted a leaf to judge its quality, she could see that the surface had been shaved. And under the shaved place, faint as breath on cold glass, there ran the ghosts of letters that no longer belonged to any word on the page. Someone had scraped this leaf. Someone had scraped the leaf and written on it again. ---