Chapter 9 The Accusation

The bishop's summons came in the middle of January, on a morning of fog that stood so thick over the fen that the mill could not be seen from the priory gate, and it came by the hand of a canon's clerk on a hired horse, sealed with the round seal of the officiality of Marlhaugh, and it was addressed to the prioress, to the prior of the manor of Wetherlaw, and to *the woman who writeth for the said priory*. Aldith read it twice, standing in the gateway with the fog on her face. The bishop's official would hear, at Marlhaugh, on the Monday after Candlemas, the question of the tithes of the parish of Wetherlaw and the lands called the fen. And because in the course of the plea there had been put forward a book called the register of the house of Nethmarsh, and because divers persons had affirmed that the said book was scraped and altered in a matter touching the said lands, the official commanded that the book be brought and laid before him whole and unaltered as it stood, and commanded further that the person or persons who had last had the said book in custody should come and answer. The last to have the book in custody was Aldith. She took the summons to the prioress, who read it in her bed and for a long while said nothing, and then asked for Father Reynold. Reynold came and read it in his turn and went grey. "'The person who had the book in custody,'" he said. "It has a name in it somewhere. She is to come and answer. She is to be cited, and the book is to be examined, and the man who wrote it sits in this shire with the lord's ear." He looked at Aldith and then away, at the wintry window, embarrassed, as he always was when the world was what it was. "I will go with you. I will stand beside you. But I will tell you plainly what I am worth there. I am a chaplain of a small house with no advowson worth a lord's notice, and my word will be weighed against the archdeacon's clerk's, and it will be found light." "You are not to be weighed at all," said the prioress from the bed. "You are to be seen standing there, which is different. A woman cannot come to the bishop's court alone. She must come with a man or not at all. That is the first wall, and we cannot pull it down, so we will lean on it." The citation ran on, and worse was written after it. Aldith read the rest in the gateway, alone, before she took it in to the prioress, because she wanted to know the whole of her danger before she stood in front of anyone with it. The clerk of the official had written, at the official's command, that upon the plea certain depositions had been taken from Sir Fulk's officers touching the state of the said book. And there followed a sentence that seemed to Aldith to have been written very carefully, as a thing is written that is meant to inflame a court before ever it sits. The deposition of Theodric of Wetherlaw, clerk, was that he had made an inventory of the said chest in the winter before, and that the register then lay whole, and that the foundation charter was then in the chest. The deposition of Master Achard of Rushbourne, writer, was that he had lately seen the leaves of the said register, and that in his skill the words touching the alms of the fen were written in a hand fresher than the rest and on a skin scraped and smoothed, and that such work, in his judgement, was the work of one practiced in the pen and having a purpose to make the fen appear the free gift of the founder. And last, the deposition of Sir Fulk's steward, that on a day early in the new year the woman who writes for the said priory had been seen at the chest alone, with the door shut. Aldith stood in the fog with the summons in her hand and felt the cold go through her coat as if it were not there. Theodric had made the inventory, and Achard would swear to the scrape, and the scrape was true, and the words that were fresher were true too, and every true thing in their hands had been fitted together into a lie that pointed at her, and she could see exactly how it had been done because it was the way she herself would have done it, if she had been the kind of person who did such things. A true scrape, a true freshness, a true hand at the chest, and out of three truths a false whole. She went back into the house and found Tibba and set her to fetching the register from under the prioress's pillow, because there was work to be done and no more time to be afraid in, and Tibba, who was seventeen and had never yet been right in a large matter, asked her one question that Aldith could not answer for three days afterward. "Is it true," Tibba said, "that we are the ones who must prove we did not do it, when we did not do it?" "That is how it is in the world," said Aldith. "You must prove your innocence, and the man who is guilty has only to wait." Tibba thought about that for a while, and then said the other half of it, which was the half Aldith had not said aloud because it frightened her more than the court did. "Then the man who is guilty has only to sit still and let you do all the work in front of everyone, and when you are tired he will say one more thing, and it will be one more thing than you have strength left to answer." "Yes," said Aldith. "That is the whole art of it. A court is not won by the man who is right. It is won by the man who is still standing when the other one sits down." "Then we will not sit down," said Tibba. She took the register down to her own house and barred the door, and in the little cold room with the fire up she did the one thing that came to her hand and not the one that came to her heart, which was to take a fresh half-sheet and begin, for the first time, to write the whole matter down in the order of a court, day by day, charge by charge, and to write beside each charge the thing that answered it, and to write, at the foot of the sheet, the name of every man in the shire who would stand and say the answer had been seen with his own eyes. There were not many names. She counted them twice and there were four: the chandler, the chandler's boy, the parchmenter, and Warin. And then she went to the door and opened it and stood in the fog and added, in her mind, a fifth, the precentor of Cresswell, who had read four hundred hands and was afraid of being seen to be kind. Five names against a lord. She shut the door and went back to the table and lit another rush dip with the end of the first, and began to write. ---