Chapter 7 Cresswell Abbey

Cresswell stood on a low hill above a bend of the Amel, where the river widened and slowed and spread itself across a shallow valley, and the abbey owned the valley and the hill and, it was said, a third of the wool that went down the river to the sea. Its church was longer than any building Aldith had ever entered. Its cloister was not one garth but two, and its scriptorium was a whole range of stone, with a room for the writers and another for the rubrishers and another for the men who ruled the leaves, and a fourth room where the finished books were kept chained. Aldith had never seen so many people employed in the making of a book. In the writers' room four men sat at four benches, each with his own window and his own horn of ink, and a boy went between them with the pounces and the spare quills, and a fifth man did nothing all morning but rule leaves, the whole of his labour a straight line ruled by rule. She stood in the doorway that the porter held open and looked in, and the men looked up at her the way a room of men looks up at a woman in a door, which is once and then not again, and she understood in that moment the whole distance between her house and this one. At Nethmarsh there was one scriptorium and one writer in it and she was that writer, and when she died the room would be a store again. Here were four writers and a boy and a ruler and a room of chained books, and not one of them would have been allowed past her own gate to copy a lease for a tenant, because the copying of leases was woman's work and the copying of psalters was a trade. They came to it on the third day of the Christmas season, when the abbey was full of guests and the guest-hall was loud with men who had ridden in for the feast, and because the roads were bad and the year was ending, the porter would not at first believe that a woman and a girl and a merchant had come so far for a piece of writing. "We have a letter from Canon Vitold," Warin said, and gave it, and the porter read it and went away and came back and led them in. The abbot's man was the precentor, a canon named Ilbert, and he was young for the office, perhaps thirty, with ink on his fingers and a face that had spent more time on books than on men. He read Vitold's letter twice. Then he looked at Warin, and then at Aldith, and then back at Warin. "You want the enrolment of the charters of Nethmarsh Priory, made at the visitation three years past," he said. "Which are in the bishop's box, which is in the muniment, which is under the abbot's key and the bishop's seal, and both of them are gone from this house. The abbot is at Clerkenholt until the Purification. The bishop's commissioner is at Marlhaugh and will not return before Candlemas." "Then the box cannot be opened," Warin said. "I did not say that. I said the box cannot be opened by me." Ilbert turned the letter over in his hands. "I can open a box with a warrant. I cannot open one without. Vitold's letter asks that the enrolment be shown; it does not command. He writes as one canon to another, and he writes to me, not to the abbot." He set the letter down. "If the abbot were here, he might allow it. If the bishop were here, he would allow it, because he would have to. As it stands, I can bring you the box and show you its seal and tell you what is written on the tag, and I can do no more, and I am sorry for it." "When will you do that much?" Aldith asked. Ilbert looked at her, and it seemed to her that he was not surprised to be answered by the woman, which was itself a small surprise. "Now, if you will," he said. "The old box is in the treasure room. You may not enter it, but you may stand at the door and I will bring the box to the threshold, and you may see the seal whole and unbroken and the tag with the visitation's date upon it, and you may go home and tell Vitold that his box is safe and his enrolment within, and that is the best a letter can do." So it was. He brought the box to the door of the treasure room and held it up in the light of the cloister, and it was bound with iron and corded about with twisted seal-thread, and the seal was the bishop's round seal in red wax, whole and uncracked, and the tag bore the year of the visitation in the registrar's own hand. Aldith looked at it for a long time. She could not open it, and she could not touch it, and she could see, all the same, that if the seal were ever to be broken, every canon in the house would know. "Will you do one more thing for us?" she asked. "When the bishop's man returns, or the abbot, will you send word to the priory, and say that a woman came, and that the woman wants the box, and that the woman will come again?" "I will send the word," said Ilbert. "I cannot promise more. I am the precentor of a house of men, and the muniment is not mine." He paused. "But I will tell you a thing in fairness, since you have come so far over such roads. The last time the bishop's commissioner was here, he spoke of a matter that touches your house. He said that the bishop had been asked, by a great lord of the fen, to settle the tithes of a parish called Wetherlaw, and that the lord's man had come twice about it, and pressed." "Which lord?" Warin asked. "Of the fen. The lord of Wetherlaw." Aldith stood in the cold cloister with the box's image still on her eyes and understood that the matter she was trying to prove was already known to the bishop's court, and that it was known from one side only. That night they lodged at the abbey guest-hall, and in the morning, before they left, Ilbert found her in the cloister by the scribes' door and spoke to her in a low voice, as one who does a small right thing and is afraid of being seen to do it. "Mistress," he said, "you showed Vitold how to find a mend in a leaf, and Vitold wrote of it to me, and it is the only reason I brought the box out at all. So I will tell you this. There is a house of nuns in the north of this shire whose register was scraped, and whose lands were lost to their lord, and it was done some forty years ago and never undone, and the women there still say it was not their doing. I have read their register. I have seen the leaves. And I have not forgotten the hands in it, because a man who reads books for a living does not forget hands." He paused. "If yours can be read as hands are read, bring it to the bishop's court and let him read it. A book is the only witness in this country that is not asked whether it is a man or a woman." He went back into the cloister, and they rode home. ---