Chapter 15 The Collation

Candlemas eve, and the abbey full to the walls with men come for the court: the lord of Wetherlaw and his household; the master who had pleaded for him, a thin scholar with a cold eye; Master Achard of Rushbourne, who had pledged himself to stand and did not look at Aldith when she passed him in the cloister; the abbot, back from Clerkenholt the day before; the bishop's official; and, in the corners and the shadows, every canon of the house who could find an excuse to be within sight of a good quarrel. Aldith spent the day before the court in a small chamber in the guest-range that Ilbert had got for her, doing the work that would decide whether she kept her hand. She made the collation. A collation, in the meaning she had been taught, was the laying of two texts against each other so that every difference between them stood up and was seen. Her father had made collations of the gospels, and of two copies of a chronicle, and had taught her that the whole art of it was in the ruling: you rule a page into columns, and you write one reading in the first column and the other in the second, line against line, so that the eye cannot run away from a difference and cannot hide one in the middle of a paragraph. She ruled a full sheet into columns. In the first column she wrote the reading of the register as it now stood: the lease, the three lives, the bounds short, the mill gone. In the second she wrote the reading of the enrolment made three years ago, when the charter was whole: the gift, the free and perpetual alms, the bounds long, the mill kept. She drew a line between them. She wrote at the head of the third column what the hollows in the leaf said, word for word, as she had read them by the raking light and the lampblack, and the third column matched the second and not the first, which was the whole point of the thing, written out so that even a man who could not read hands could read a column. Then she made a second table, smaller, for the seals. In the first column the legend of the founder's true seal, taken from the abbey's charter of the founder's own time: *FULBERTI*. In the second the name as the old copyist had drawn it in the margin of the register: *FULBETRI*. Under them, a blank ruled space, with a line drawn across it and the word *the deed* written above the blank in her neatest hand, because the third seal she could not write yet, and the blank ruled space waited for it the way a bed waits for a man. She made three copies of the collation before midnight, and gave one to Warin, and one to Reynold, and kept the third, and sewed the pricking and the tracing into her sleeve, and went to bed for four hours and did not sleep, and rose for the Prime bell with her hands as steady as they had ever been in her life, because she had done the only thing a person can do to steady her hands, which was to work until the work was finished and there was nothing left but the day. At Prime, in the cold dark before the chapter house, Ilbert found her in the cloister and stood beside her with his hands in his sleeves and said what he had been keeping since the box was opened. "I have been thinking all night about what I will say if they ask me how I know the founder's seal," he said. "I am the precentor, and my word is a canon's word, and a canon's word is worth something in the bishop's court. So they will ask me, and I will say what is true, that I read the legend on the abbey's charter with my own eyes and it is not written the way the lord's deed is written. And then they will ask me how I came to look at the lord's deed at all, and I will have to say that a woman asked me to, and then they will look at me the way they look at a man who has been led by a woman, and it will be said of me in this house for a year." He looked at the pale sky. "I have decided that I do not much care. I have spent my life copying texts and I have never once been asked to copy a man. It seems to me that if the text is true, it does not matter whose eye found it." "It matters to the men who will judge it," said Aldith. "Then let them judge it," said Ilbert. "I am a precentor, not a bishop. My whole office is to read out loud what has been written and to get it right." The chapter house of Cresswell was a long room under a vaulted stone, with a bench running round the walls and a great table in the middle and a window high in the gable that let down a single slant of pale winter light. By the time Aldith came in, an hour before the court, the room was cold as a crypt and the court's clerk was already laying out the rolls, and the sheriff's man was standing at the door with the staff of his office, and Vitold was sitting at the head of the table with his hands folded, looking at nothing. She set down the register in its wrap and the collation and the pricking and the tracing on the bench beside her, and then she stood in the place they had given her, which was a place at the end of the table with no chair, and she waited. They came in: Sir Fulk heavy and red in his cloak of office, with his master and his steward and his men; the abbot, old and mild, who sat beside the official and said little; Achard, alone, with his cap in his hands; the parchmenter; the chandler, who had come all the way from Rushbourne on a borrowed horse because his boy's penny was in it; Warin; Reynold; and Godith, who had been carried the whole way in a litter by two of the abbey's lay brothers because she had refused, in her plain way, to let the house be represented before a court by anyone younger. Vitold opened the court with a prayer and a reading of the commission, and then he set the two books on the table, the register and the enrolment, and told the court that before the pleading began the court would hear one matter of form, because a form can outlast an argument. "There are two writings here," he said, "a register and an enrolment, and they disagree upon the gift of the fen. Before we hear what the lord says of the fen, we will establish what happened to the register. That is a thing the court will see done with its own eyes first, and then the pleaders may talk until Vespers. Mistress, come forward." And Aldith came forward, and the room's two hundred eyes came onto her, and she was as she had been at her bench all her life, alone with a book and a reason, and she stopped being afraid in the way a horse stops being afraid when the race has begun, and she reached for the raking light. ---