Chapter 16 The Leaf Made to Speak

She did it in the plainest order she knew, the order she had been taught as a girl, and she did it slowly because a thing done slowly in front of men who are in a hurry is a thing men remember. First the light. She asked the clerk of the court to hold the register up so that the winter sun from the high window came along the leaf, almost flat, the way the sun comes over a field at evening, and she asked the men at the table to look at the leaf edge-on and to say what they saw. At first they saw nothing, because they did not know how to look. Then the abbot, who had read a great many books in his long life, leaned forward and said that the skin had a bright place in it, a lane, and that the brightness did not follow the lines of the calf. "Where is the lane?" said Vitold. "Under the clause, my lord. And under the bounds." "Then let every man who will come and see it, and let them look with their own eyes and say with their own mouths that they have seen it, and let the clerk write the names of those who looked." They came and looked, twelve or fourteen of them, in small groups, the lord's pleader and Sir Fulk's steward among them, and Theodric last of all, and Theodric looked at the leaf for a long moment and said nothing, and his face did not change, and Aldith, watching him, knew that he had looked at that leaf many times in the night and had never once found the lane, because he had never been taught to look along a surface and not at it, and because he knew the scrape was there and his eye could not see what his guilt had stopped believing anyone else would see. Then the wash. She took a horn of lampblack and a clean brush and laid the thinnest wash she had ever laid, over the lane and a hand's breadth around it, and brushed the surface almost dry, and held the leaf again to the light. The black sank into the hollow grain of the unharmed skin and would not sit on the scraped lane, and the lane stood out white and dull against the black, plain as a road across a field, and the men who had doubted it looked at each other and were quiet. "Now the ink," said Aldith. She asked for water, and the clerk brought a cup, and she dipped the corner of a clean cloth and laid it on the false clause, the three lives, and held it there while she counted to ten, and lifted it. The false words lifted with the cloth. They smeared into the wet, and the letters blurred, and under the smear the old ink of the surrounding line held black and dry and clear. "Again," said Vitold. "On the other words. The bounds, the mill." She did it again on the words that stood where the mill had been named, and the old ink held, and did not run, and the court saw a fresh hand run and an old hand hold, in the same court, on the same leaf, within the same hour. An old canon at the back of the room crossed himself, and the abbot said, half to himself and half to the table, that he had read books for fifty years and had never before seen one confess. Sir Fulk of Wetherlaw sat without moving, and the lord's pleader wrote on a slip of parchment with a rapid, angry hand, and Theodric looked at the leaf and then at the door and then at the leaf again. Then she laid the collation on the table, the ruled sheet with the two readings in two columns and the hollows' reading in the third, and she stood back, and Vitold read it aloud, column by column, so that the whole room heard the register say a lease and the enrolment say a gift and the hollows under the scrape say the same gift that the enrolment said, and the third column matched the second and contradicted the first, and no man in the room could sit through it without understanding that the leaf had once said one thing and now said another, and that the words it had once said were the words that kept the fen for the nuns. "Master," said Vitold, "you have heard the demonstration and seen the leaf. What do you say for the lord?" The thin master rose and said what a good pleader says when the ground under him has been dug away: he did not deny the leaf, because the leaf was undeniable, and he did not deny the loan of the words, because to deny a thing seen is worse than to admit it. He said, instead, the only thing that could still save his client, and he said it well. "My lord official," he said, "we do not dispute that the leaf is scraped. We say that the scraped words are the words the priory's own writer made. The house was losing the fen. The house had the book in its keeping. The house's writer had the ink and the skill and the reason. What we have seen today is not the proof that the lord's men altered the book. It is the proof that the book was altered by someone who could alter it well, and the only person in this shire who alters books well is the woman standing there." A low murmur went round the room, and Aldith felt the weight of it settle onto her, the whole weight and heat of a room of men agreeing without speaking. Vitold let the murmur die. Then he said, "That is well said, and it would be well said in the schools, and here it is worth nothing, because the court has seen what the court has seen, and the court has seen which words are fresh." He turned to the register and laid his finger on the page. "The fresh words are the words of the lease. The fresh words take the fen from the nuns and give it to the lord. You say the house's writer wrote them. Tell me, master, why would the house's writer write the words that lose her house the fen? Why would a woman who means to steal a fen back for her nuns write the fresh ink on the clause that gives it away? Show me a forger, in all the history of this court or of any court you have pleaded in, who forged his own side's ruin." The lord's pleader had no answer, and everyone in the room knew he had no answer, and the room waited to see what a man does when he has no answer. He did the thing such men do at the last. "Then the lord's deed will answer for the lord," he said. "It is old, and it is sealed, and it says what a lord's deed says. Let the deed be laid on the table with the book, and let the court read them against each other, and let the court say which is the forgery." "Yes," said Vitold. "Let the deed be laid on the table." ---