Chapter 11 The Second Copy

She did not sleep that night. She sat at the table with the register open and a fresh sheet before her and did what a scribe does when a thing matters: she made a copy. The copy she made was not the copy of a text. Any clerk could copy a text, and a copy of a text could be called a forgery, and she had learned that lesson twice over. The copy she made was a copy of the leaf itself, as near as a hand could come to it: the shape of the page, the place of the initial, the line of the writing, and above all the two things a hand could be made to reproduce exactly, the shaved lane and the seal in the margin. For the shaved lane she took a thin sheet of the clearest parchment she had and laid it over the leaf and traced, with a fine pen, the outline of the lane and the ruling lines and the place of the clause, so that anyone holding the tracing over the true leaf would find lane line up with lane and rule with rule. A tracing was not a forgery. A tracing was the shadow of a thing, and the thing itself remained to be seen. But if the thing itself were ever lost or taken, the shadow would remain, and a shadow that fits a lost thing is a strange and stubborn witness. For the seal she did the work her father had taught her for the copying of difficult devices, which was to prick and pounce. She laid the thin parchment over the margin, and with a fine awl she pricked through the parchment at every turning of the drawn seal, at every letter, at every edge, so that when the parchment was lifted away it carried in its little holes the exact line of the drawing underneath. Then she rubbed lampblack into the holes and brushed the surface clean, and the place shone with a powder-point of every letter of the false name, and she set it by the flame until the black had bitten and would not rub off. She made the tracing and the pricking twice. She made a third copy of the ghost reading in plain words, in her own hand, with the day and the hour, and she made a fourth, and then she sat back and looked at the four copies on the table and worked out where they would go, because the whole art of keeping a thing was not in the making but in the scattering. One set she kept by her, sewn into the cover of the new psalter she was finishing, between the board and the leather, where a thief would have to destroy the book to find it. One set she gave to Warin, to keep in his strong-room with the hides and to deliver to Cresswell if she did not come out of the bishop's court. One set she carried to Godith in the sacristy and asked her to set among the house's precious things, rolled in a cloth and marked with the relics, because no man who robbed a house of nuns for a deed would think to look in the chest that held the true cross. "Three copies of one thing," said Godith. "Four," said Aldith. "I keep one." "That is a great deal of writing for one piece of truth." "A truth that exists in one place can be taken away, and then it is not a truth, it is a story," said Aldith. "A truth that exists in four places is harder to kill. My father used to say that a scribe's whole religion is the second copy. The first copy is the work. The second copy is the faith." She went next to the church, where the lamps were few and the air was cold, and she knelt at the back where the sisters could not see her and where she could see the altar, and she did something she had not done since she was a girl, which was to pray for her own hand. She prayed for it plainly, without ornament, the way she would write a lease. If there is anything there that hears a woman who has no one to speak for her, she said, then hear this. I have kept this house's books for eleven years and I have not made a false entry, and I have not written a word I did not believe, and I have made a living out of nothing but the truth of what I set down, which is a thin living and a hard one and I have never wanted another. If the court takes my hand, then let it take it, and I will learn to write with the left like the man in the bishop's court who begged for three years, or I will not learn, and I will sell thread, and either way I will not say one false word to buy the hand back. But if there is any way at all, and you are not above a woman's bargain, then let the leaf speak, because I have done all the speaking I am allowed and it has never once been enough. She stayed on her knees until her legs went numb and the lamp guttered, and no voice came, and no sign came, and she got up at last and went out into the cold, and it seemed to her, walking back to her own house in the dark, that the prayer had been answered and not answered in the same breath, and that the answer was the same as the answer to every prayer she had ever made, which was this: work, and be careful, and hope for nothing you have not written down. In her own house she banked the fire and sat with the copy she was keeping, and she read it over from the beginning, the shave and the ink and the gap in the bounds and the turned name in the wax, and she found no fault in it, and she understood that the copy was now the whole of her hope and that it had better be perfect, because a court would not forgive a fault in the one thing she was allowed to hand it. She took up her pen and wrote the schedule out a fifth time, cleaner than the rest, and did not sleep until the Prime bell, and when the sun came up she was still at the bench with her fingers black and the fire dead, and the fifth copy was the best of them all. She sent word to Cresswell by the same lay brother, and asked Ilbert two things: that he keep the founder's charter of the abbey safe and unshown until the commissioner had seen the register, so that no friend of the lord could get to it first; and that he have ready a strip of parchment on which the legend of the founder's seal was written out, letter for letter, as it stood on the true seal, that the two might be laid side by side. And she wrote, at the end, one more thing, which she did not show to anyone, because it was written for herself and not for a court: that she intended, if the court would not let her speak, to reach into her sleeve at the right moment and lay the pricking on the table, and that the pricking would speak in her place and had never been to school and did not know it was supposed to keep silent. Tibba, who had been watching her for an hour, set down the awl she had been practicing with and asked the question that Aldith had been waiting for her to ask. "Teach me the pricking," she said. "Not the letters. The pricking of a device. If I can learn it before the court, then there will be two of us who can do it, and if they take your hand there will still be one." Aldith looked at the girl a long time. "Sit down," she said, and slid the sample parchment across, and put the awl in her hand, and began. ---