Chapter 18 The Turning

The sheriff's man had the door, and the sheriff's man had been standing at the door since morning and had heard everything, and when Theodric of Wetherlaw turned toward the light and the way out, the staff came across the doorway and stayed there, and the clerk stood still. He stood still for a long moment, and then he did the thing that a careful man does when the ground he has built on has gone out from under him, and everyone in the room knew that he did it, because they watched him do it. "Let the lord speak first," Theodric said, to Vitold, in his flat voice. "The lord will tell you it was my work, and that I meant the fen for myself, and that he knew nothing. Ask him where the charter is. Ask him where the original of the foundation is, the one that is missing from the chest of Nethmarsh. If he cannot tell you, then let him tell you that he has never held it, and let the court decide what a lord's word is worth against a clerk's when the clerk has nothing left to lose." Sir Fulk's face went from red to grey and back to red, and his master put a hand on his arm, and the lord's pleader stood up and spoke smoothly and said that a clerk who has been convicted out of his own mouth will say anything, and that the court should not be led by a man who is already condemned. "I have not been convicted out of my own mouth," said Theodric. "I have not said a word of it. The master says I am convicted, and the master draws for the lord, and I will ask the court to notice that the lord's own pleader has decided I am guilty before the court has said so. Let him explain that to the bishop." Vitold let them go on for a while, the master and the clerk, and he watched Sir Fulk the way a man watches a fire to see which way it will fall. Then he said, "Enough," and they stopped. "The original charter of Nethmarsh," said Vitold, "is the whole matter. The register is scraped, and the deed is false, and both of those things were done in the night for a purpose, and the purpose was the fen. But the register and the deed are both copies of a thing, and the thing itself, the charter with the founder's true seal, is the one voice that cannot be copied and cannot be lied about. It is not in the chest of Nethmarsh. The clerk says the lord took it. The lord has said nothing. Let the lord say where it is, now, in this court, upon his honour, and let the clerk say where he believes it to be, and let the court weigh the two." The room was very quiet. Sir Fulk of Wetherlaw stood at the end of the table with his hands on the wood, and he looked at the bishop's official, and then at the abbot, and then, for the first time all day, at Aldith. She would remember that look. It was not the look of a man defeated. It was the look of a man who had simply moved a fence, and who intended to move it again. "The charter," he said, "came to my hands in the ordinary way. A charter that records a lord's own gift is the lord's to keep, and there is a copy in the priory's book, and there is no wrong in a lord holding the writing of his own ancestor." He said it slowly and reasonably, and half the room nodded, because half the room had been nodding to lords all their lives. "I will produce it to the bishop when it is asked for in the right form, and not before." "It is asked for now," said Vitold. "It is asked for by a clerk who has confessed to forgery," said Sir Fulk, "and I do not bow to a confessed forger's question, and I do not bow to a woman's. If the bishop himself asks me, I will answer the bishop. Not you." And there it was, at last, plain and cold in the middle of the room, the thing the whole winter had been about, and Aldith, standing at the end of the table with her hand still black from the lampblack, understood that they had won the leaf and the seal and the deed and lost the last of it anyway, because a lord is not a leaf, and a lord cannot be scraped, and a lord cannot be caught out by a turned letter in wax. A lord is answered only by a greater lord, and the greater lord was the bishop, and the bishop was in Rome or at his manor at Marlhaugh, and Sir Fulk knew exactly how long a house of nuns could wait for a bishop. Vitold knew it too. She saw him know it, and she saw him decide what to do with it, which was the thing she had begun to understand about him in the muniment at Marlhaugh: that he was a man who would give a small wrong its due and would not spend himself on a great one he could not win. "The court finds as to the writings," he said, and the clerk's pen began to move. "The register of Nethmarsh is scraped and altered in two places, in the clause touching the tenure of the fen and in the bounds touching the mill. The alteration was made by a hand that is not the hand of the old copyist and is not the hand of Aldith, scribe, who has this day shown the court the marks of it with her own hands. The deed produced by the lord of Wetherlaw is false, being sealed with a seal cut from a drawing in the register, and Master Achard of Rushbourne has confessed to drawing it. The enrolment made at the visitation of three years past stands as the true reading, and the foundation of Nethmarsh was a gift in free, pure and perpetual alms, and the fen called Harrowfen and its mill are the priory's." The clerk wrote it all. The room breathed. "And as to the men," said Vitold, "the clerk Theodric is convicted of falsifying the register of a house of religion, and of procuring a false deed, and the sentence of the court is that he be degraded from his office and delivered to the bishop's prison, and that he return the writings he has taken or say where they are, and that if he does not return them he be kept in prison at the bishop's pleasure." He paused. "And because he is a clerk in the bishop's orders, this court cannot take his hand, as it would take the hand of a layman who did the same. The court takes his office and his name, and the rest is the bishop's." Aldith heard the sentence and understood it, and something in her went cold and still. A man who had done the thing they accused her of would have lost the hand that wrote. The clerk who had truly done it lost only his office, because the office was the shield, and the shield was the one thing a woman could never hold. Achard of Rushbourne was fined a hundred shillings and bound over, and the fine would ruin him, and he took it standing and did not complain, and when the court rose he came to Aldith in the cloister and stood before her with his cap in his hands and said nothing at all, and she said nothing back, and after a while he went away, and that was the whole of the reconciliation between them. Sir Fulk of Wetherlaw walked out of the chapter house without being sentenced, because the court had not sentenced him, and could not, and did not. He walked out through the crowd of canons with his men behind him and his master at his elbow, and at the door he stopped and looked back at the four writings on the table and at the woman still standing at the end of it, and he said, to no one and to everyone: "A fen is a fen. There will be another bishop, and another court, and another winter." ---