Chapter 19 The Finding

Godith died on the feast of the Purification, before dawn, in the litter in the guest-hall of Cresswell, and she died without pain and without speaking, with the house's keys in her hands and her face turned toward the east window where the light would come. Aldith was with her. She had sat with her through the night because the old woman had asked for her, and near the end Godith had opened her eyes and said one thing that Aldith carried for years afterward like a stone in a pocket, turning it over when she could not sleep. "They will write it all down in the bishop's roll," Godith said, "and they will write the lord's name and the clerk's name and the master's name and the name of the book, and they will not write yours, because there is no room in a roll for the name of a woman who reads hands. And in fifty years the roll will say that a book was scraped and a deed was false and the fen was saved, and no one will know that it was you, and you must be content with that, because a house outlives a name, and you have saved a house." "I would rather have saved a name," said Aldith. "Then you do not understand what you have done," said Godith, and closed her eyes, and did not say anything more. The house's chalice came back. The prior of the plea was reversed. The register was sealed by the court's clerk and carried back to Nethmarsh, and Aldith sewed it into a new binding with her whole attention, because a book that has been through a court becomes a piece of evidence forever, and a piece of evidence must be kept as carefully as a relic. She copied the foundation charter into the new cartulary with the true words and the true bounds and the true name of the founder, spelled as Fulbert spelled Fulbert, and she wrote in the margin of the new book a small note in her own hand, which she did not draw from any old book, and which said: *copied from the enrolment made at the visitation, and from the hollows of the old leaf, which the court saw, in the year of this writing.* The prioress, who had been ill all winter, got up at the end of February and went back to her office and said nothing about the winter to anyone. But one evening, in the parlour, with the fire between them, she said the thing that Aldith had been waiting for her to say, and said it plainly. "I knew the charter was missing before you found the shave," Wymarc said. "I knew it from the day the chest was shut and the inventory made. I did not tell the court, and I did not tell you, because I was afraid that if the house admitted it had lost its own foundation, the bishop would rule the house a house without a title, and the fen and the mill and the tofts and the salt-pans would go to the lord in one piece, and there would be nothing left to save. I made the house's choice, and I made it alone, and I made it wrong, and it put you in front of a court with a scraped book and a lord's word against you, and if you had lost your hand it would have been my doing as much as the clerk's." She looked into the fire. "I have not asked your forgiveness and I will not. I am telling you so that you will know what a house is. A house is a thing that will spend one person to keep the rest, and it will do it again, and I have done it to you, and I will do it again if I must, and I am telling you to your face so that you are never surprised by it again." Aldith sat with her hands in her lap and thought about the eleven years and the woman who had hired her father and then hired her and had paid her the same wage and never once told her to write smaller. And she understood, sitting there, that she had been saved by a book and used by a house, and that both of those were true at once and would stay true, and that she could live inside that, because she had lived inside worse. "I will not forget it," she said. "No," said the prioress. "I did not think you would." The house took up its life. The fen gave its hay and its turf and its reeds, and the mill turned in March when the water came up, and the tenants ground their corn and paid their toll, and no man of Wetherlaw came onto the fen that spring. Tibba learned the pricking and learned the ruling and began, slowly, to write a small, even hand, the way a girl learns a hand, by copying the letters of another. Warin took Aldith to Marlhaugh in April to be paid for the winter's pleadings by the bishop's receiver, and on the way he said, once, with the carefulness of a man who has been thinking of a thing for a long time, that she might come into his household and keep his books and never want for bread again. "I will think on it," she said, which meant no, and he knew it meant no, and he did not ask again. The house buried Godith on the third day after Candlemas, in the little burying ground behind the church, where the oldest graves leaned and the yew had grown so wide that half the ground lay in its shadow, and the prioress read the office herself in a voice that carried better than it should have for a woman who had spent the winter in her bed. Aldith stood at the back with the sisters and watched the earth go in, and afterward, when the others had gone, she stayed, because she had one thing to say and it was not a prayer and she wanted to say it where no one would correct her. "You were wrong about one thing," she said to the grave, in the plainest voice she had. "You said a house outlives a name, and it does. You said I must be content to save a house and not a name, and I am not content and I will not pretend to be. But you were right that the roll says nothing about me, and you were right that it never will, and I have decided that this is not the same as being unremembered. There is a note in the new cartulary in my own hand, and the note says where the true words came from, and it does not say my name, and in a hundred years some copyist will find that note and read it and know that somebody once read a scraped leaf by the light and told the truth about it. That is my name, written in the only place a woman's name can be written and last, which is the margin of a book." The sun came up over the fen and the yew dripped and Aldith went back to the scriptorium and finished the psalter, and it was the best work she ever did, and she never told anyone why. She thought, that spring, that she had come to the end of the thing, and that the summer would be the summer, and the harvest the harvest, and the next winter a winter like other winters. And then, on the last day of May, a rider came up the lane to the priory gate, and the rider wore the livery of the bishop's household, and he carried a letter, and the letter was sealed with the round seal of the officiality of Marlhaugh, and it was addressed to Aldith. ---