Chapter 4 Master Achard's Bench

Rushbourne was a market town of four streets and a bridge, and it had one scrivener besides Aldith, and his name was Achard. He kept his bench in the porch of the town church, under a board that read *Achard, Writer*, and he wrote deeds and letters and accounts for the merchants of the town, and he did it well enough, and he never let anyone forget that he had been trained in the bishop's chancery at Marlhaugh and had left it, as he told the story, because he preferred honest work to court work. The story was told so often that the town believed it. Aldith had heard it in the chandler's one winter and had said nothing, because she knew the other half of it from her father, who had known the man who turned Achard out of the chancery for taking money to write a letter in another man's hand. Hamo had told her that story once and never repeated it, on the grounds that a woman who spread other people's shames would find her own spread for her. She went into Rushbourne three days before All Saints, with Tibba and a basket and a list, to buy what the scriptorium needed for the winter's work: three calf skins from the parchment-maker, a horn of lampblack, a quarter-ounce of vermilion in its cloth, a packet of galls, and a pound of the bleached wax that the priory's seal used, because the priory was low and the Christmas leases would need sealing. A sealed lease was a lease that would hold. An unsealed one was a quarrel waiting for a court. Achard stood in his porch with his board at his back and a young man at the second stool, and he looked up when she crossed the square and followed her with his eyes all the way to the parchmenter's stall. He did not greet her. He had not greeted her in nine years, not since the day she had taken a commission he believed to be his, and done it at half his price and better. At the chandler's she asked after the wax, and old Randel, who had stood behind the same counter for forty years, went into the back and brought out a soft pale block and set it on the board and cut her a pound with a wire. "Bleached," he said. "The same as always. Your house takes the bleached. The lord's men take the yellow." He said it idly, weighing, and then he said, "Though they took a pound of the bleached in the summer, and green copper besides, and asked no price and paid in silver, which is not their way." "Green copper?" "Verdigris. I keep a little for painters. The clerk bought the whole of it." Randel shrugged. "It came back to me that they were mending a book at Wetherlaw. There is a man there writes for the lord. Theodric. A thin man with a soft hand." Aldith put the wax in her basket and paid for it and said nothing at all, and all the way home she thought about the green that had been bought in the summer and carried up to Wetherlaw, and how a man mending a book with verdigris would leave the marks of it in the leaves he mended, and how verdigris, left in parchment, would eat its way slowly outward in a ring of rot the colour of a wound. On the morning of All Saints she went with the prioress to the manor court at Wetherlaw, and Father Reynold rode beside them, and Tibba led the sumpter that carried the register in a leather satchel, because the prioress had decided in the end that the register went with them, and that Aldith would carry it and read from it when the court bade her, since the court would not take a woman's voice but it would take a book's. The hall of Wetherlaw was long and cold and smelled of sour rushes and wet wool. Sir Fulk sat at the high end in a chair with arms, a heavy man of fifty with a red face and pale eyes and the manner of one who had never in his life been contradicted by anyone he considered a person. The steward sat below him at a table with the rolls, and the steward's name was Theodric, and Aldith had seen him once or twice at the priory and had thought him unremarkable, a thin man with a soft hand, exactly as the chandler had said, and she looked at him now and thought of the green copper and said nothing. The prior of the manor court was read, the essoin taken, the list of tenants called. And then Sir Fulk told his steward to read the plea, and the steward read it in a flat clerk's voice: that the fen called Harrowfen had never been given to the nuns in free alms; that the founder had granted it to them only for the term of three lives; that the last of those lives being nearly spent, the fen returned to the lord of Wetherlaw; and that to prove his words the lord had a deed, sealed, of the founder's own time, which he would show the court. "You may see it," Sir Fulk said, and looked at the prioress and smiled, and the smile of a man who owns the ground under his neighbour's feet is a particular kind of smile. The deed was brought and laid on the table. It was a single sheet, and old, or made to look old, and it bore a round seal of pale wax on a green cord, and the wax was bright and unbroken, and the impression on it was as clean as a coin struck yesterday. Aldith looked at it across the hall and could not read a word at that distance, and she did not need to. She needed only to see how the light came in on the wax, and how the seal of a charter of the founder's time, a hundred years old, should have been dull and dark and worn at the edges from a hundred years of being handled and turned. This seal was the colour of new butter. It had never been handled at all. She leaned toward the prioress's ear and whispered the one thing she had time to whisper. "Ask them the year." And Wymarc, who had been prioress for nineteen years and knew exactly how much a woman could say in a room of men, stood and asked the court the year of the deed. Was it, she asked, of the founder's own time, or a copy? And if a copy, by whose hand, and enrolled where, and why was the original not shown, and why did its seal carry the founder's device in white wax, when the house's own certain charters of that age carried the founder's device in yellow, and the house had the founder's seal-impress in its own register to prove it? The steward looked at the prioress, and then at Sir Fulk. "The prioress may put her questions in writing," he said, "and the clerk will consider them. This court does not take a woman's speech. It takes what is enrolled." And he turned to his roll and wrote, and while he wrote, Aldith, standing at the prioress's shoulder with the register satchel on her arm, watched his hand travel across the parchment, and she saw that the hand which could write so flat and even a plea could write anything at all. The court found for the lord. It was not long about it. The fen was the lord's, the mill was the lord's, the priory's title was a lease of three lives, and the prior of the plea was enrolled and sealed. Sir Fulk would not press for the turf already cut. He was, he said, a reasonable man. Outside, in the cold, the prioress put her hand on Aldith's arm and spoke in a voice that did not carry beyond the two of them. "Now the bishop. Candlemas. If the manor holds the land, the tithes come up at Candlemas, and the bishop's official will hear them, and he will hear only what is written and what is shown. Vitold is an ambitious man and a careful one, and he will not take a lord's word against a house of nuns for nothing. He will want the documents. So bring him the documents." "The clerk's seal was new," Aldith said. "The wax was new. The cord was new. Everything about that deed was new except the lie." "Then prove it with something that is old," said Wymarc. ---