Chapter 3 The Scraped Leaf

She went back to the scriptorium and barred the door. The room faced north, which was why it was the scriptorium; a south window would have poured a shifting yellow light across the page and made every colour lie. The north light came in flat and cool and true, and in the flatness of it Aldith turned the old cartulary so that the leaf caught the window at a long slant, and looked. A parchment leaf is not flat, whatever it pretends. It has hills and hollows, the marks of the calf it came from, the little ridges where the hair lay and the smoother side where the flesh was. A writer learns to feel those hills through the tip of the quill. And a writer learns, too, to feel a place that is smoother than its neighbours, because there is only one way to make parchment smoother than it was made: to scrape it, with a knife or a pumice stone, and to rub it down and write again. The place under the great initial A was smoother than the field of the leaf around it. Not by much. By less than the depth of a hair. But she had been trained to feel less than a hair, had been trained by a father who had lost his sight and needed her eyes and her fingers to be his, and she felt it now, and then she saw it, and then she set about proving it to herself the way she would prove anything to a court that did not want to believe her. She took the leaf to the window and held it so that the light struck it almost along the surface, a raking glare that would show every rise and fall. The scraped place showed as a pale lane across the parchment, a few fingers wide, running from just before the clause to just after it, and inside that lane the surface had a faint dull sheen, like cloth rubbed the wrong way, where the new ink sat on a skin the old surface had once covered. She took up her little horn of lampblack and a fine brush and went over the lane with the thinnest possible wash, the way she would lay a shadow on a face. The black settled into the hollows and refused the smooth. And there, in the hollows, the truth came up. Letters. Not words, not yet, but the ghosts of letters, the little furrows the old pen had cut before the knife came. She tilted the leaf this way and the light caught the furrows and made them cast their tiny shadows, and she read them the way a blind man reads a face. The clause read now: *for the term of the lives of the sisters Amice and Godith and Wymarc, of that house*. Three lives. The last of them, the prioress, was not yet dead, but that was a small difficulty and one that time would solve, and until it did Sir Fulk could argue, and after it did he would own the fen outright. Under the clause, in the hollows, the old pen had cut something else, longer and older, and she read it letter by letter, the way a cartulary hand reads another cartulary hand across a hundred years, and what she read was: *in free, pure and perpetual alms*. Free, pure and perpetual alms. The words that could not be undone. The words that said the fen and the mill were God's, and the lord's heirs must keep their hands off them forever. She sat back on the stool and let the leaf lie and looked at nothing for a while, and her hands, which were steady with a pen, were not quite steady now. She had found a forgery in her own house's book of memory, and a forgery was not a small thing. It was a knife aimed at the house's throat, and it had been in the book for a year, or two, or more, and she had been copying that book faithfully, leaf by leaf, and had copied the false clause into the new register as a thing true. She had been, for a year, the hand that carried the lie forward. She got up and found the new cartulary where she had left it, the bundle of gatherings with her own fair copies in it, and she found the foundation charter among them and read what she had written: *for the term of the lives of the sisters*. Her own hand. Her own ink. She took the leaf and considered it, and then she set it aside, not torn, because a torn leaf was a thing that could be seen and asked about, but set aside, out of the bundle, to be dealt with. Then she fetched the old register and laid the two side by side, and went through the old one leaf by leaf, looking for other shaves, other smoother places, other lanes of dull sheen in the raking light. There was one more. The bounds of the fen, which the foundation charter had set out at length, *from the two willows and the old ditch as the water runneth to the mill*, had been scraped too, and the words *and the mill* cut away, so that the fen the charter now described stopped short at the water and left the mill standing on land the house did not hold. Two cuts, in one charter. The fen and the mill. The whole of the house's living, taken twice over in the same place. She wrote it all down, then, in her own hand, on a half-sheet: the day, the book, the leaf, the clause, the bounds, the reading she had got from the hollows, the reading that stood on the surface, and the fact of the shave itself, which was the one thing her eyes could swear to better than any words. She did not sign it. A signed sheet by a woman was worth less than an unsigned one by nobody. She wanted to hand it to men who would have to argue with the parchment and not with her. That evening she brought the two books and the half-sheet down to the prioress's parlour, and Father Reynold was there, the priest who served the house, a mild, careful man of forty who read his offices slowly and had a face that had never once, in Aldith's knowledge, refused to look at her. She showed them the leaf. She showed them the raking light and the shaved lane and the hollow letters, and she did it slowly, so that they could see it with their own eyes and not take her word for it, because their eyes were what she needed. Wymarc looked and was silent for a long time. Reynold looked and crossed himself. "Free, pure and perpetual alms," he said. "Then it was a gift, and no living man can take it back." "That is what the hollows say," said Aldith. "Can they be read otherwise?" "They can be read otherwise by anyone who does not wish to read them at all." She laid the half-sheet before them. "So I have written down the reading, and the marks of the scrape, and the hour I found them, and I ask you, Father, to set your name to this, not as a witness to the reading, but as a witness that the leaf is scraped and that I did not scrape it." Reynold reached for the sheet, and stopped, and did not pick it up. He looked at the prioress, and the prioress looked at him, and some small silent bargain passed between them that Aldith was not part of. "The court of the manor sits at Wetherlaw on the feast of All Saints," Reynold said at last. "If we are to say anything, we must say it there, or we must say it to the bishop. When the manor court declares the fen leased, the bishop's court will hear the tithes on the ground the manor has named, and the ground will already be Sir Fulk's before ever the tithes come up." He folded his hands. "I will keep your sheet, Aldith. I will keep it safe. But I will not put my name to it yet. Not until I have asked my own better judgement, and asked it in the right order." "Which order is the right one?" "The order that keeps the house standing," he said, and had the grace to look ashamed of the answer. The prioress said nothing. She took the old register and held it closed upon her knee with both hands, as if it might otherwise open and let the worms out. "If the register is the only voice that can speak for the house," Wymarc said quietly, "then it is the register we must send. Not you, Aldith. You are a woman, and they will not hear you. Find out what the parchment can prove, and prove it through the parchment, and leave your own self out of it as much as God will let you." Aldith stood in the cold parlour and looked at the two of them, the priest with his folded hands and the prioress with her book, and understood, without bitterness, exactly what the house could and could not do for her. "Very well," she said. "Then I will make the parchment speak. And God help the man whose name is on the lie when it does." ---