Chapter 19 The Roster's Third Column

She went to the chapel in the middle of the night, which was not a thing she had ever done before, and the door was unlocked, which told her, in a place like Grithfen, that she was expected. Drusilla Rennock was inside with a lamp and the two books, sitting at the reading desk as if she had been there for hours. Perhaps she had. She looked older in the lamplight than Eudora had ever seen her, and there was a greyness about her mouth that Eudora, whose whole trade was reading bodies, could diagnose from across the room and did not want to. "You are dying," Eudora said. "I have been dying a year. It is why the parish wrote for a new midwife." Drusilla did not look up from the books. "Sit down. You have come to ask the question, and I will answer it, and then you will decide, and I would rather you decided with the book in front of you than without." Eudora sat. Drusilla turned the green ledger on the desk so that it faced her and opened it to the very front, back past the page Eudora had signed, back past the older page pasted in, to a page so old the ink had gone the colour of the paper, and there, in a hand that was almost illegible, was the first entry of the book. "A girl child was born of a woman of this parish in the year the water stood three feet in the chapel," Drusilla said. "The midwife of that time named her and kept her. Her name does not matter. What matters is this. That child grew up here among us and in time she was the one who told the parish which of its children the water would want, because she could hear it, the way I can hear it, the way the one you have at your hearth will hear it when she is grown. The Bride is not out in the marsh, Eudora Cawdle. The Bride is the name we have given to a thing that lives here among us, in a house, in a body, one at a time, and when that body dies the water makes another and puts it ashore, and the parish must have a midwife to bring it into the world safely and see it named, and that, and nothing else, is what the Bond is." Eudora sat very still with her hands in her lap and looked at the child, in her memory, sleeping through the ninth bell, and at the reeds arranged in Mirabel Ossel's braid, and at the pale calm thing she had delivered in the stone room by the gate, and she understood, all at once and entirely, the shape of what she had walked into the middle of. "The Tithe is not the water taking a child," she said. "The Tithe is the water giving us one." "Once in a generation. Usually. Sometimes twice, when we have been unlucky, which is why the midwives keep the count." Drusilla turned the pages and Eudora saw, in the third column, going back and back, the small crosses and beside each cross a woman's name. "And for the rest of the years, in between, the one who hears tells us which of the ordinary children the water is owed, and we pay, and the parish lives. Both halves of the Bond. You were hired for the first half and you have done it. The girl at your hearth is the seventh Bride's child this parish has kept since the book began. In time she will make the count, and you will be dead by then, and the parish will go on." "And Loveday." "Loveday would not keep the count. She began hiding the marked children, and the parish paid and paid, and the water grew impatient, and one night she walked out to the gate and would not turn back." Drusilla looked down at the book. "I did not choose her death. I did not save her from it either. That is the whole difference between her and me." "Then take the child back." Eudora's voice was steady. "You have your Bride, and you have your new one, and you have had your use of me. Take her, and give me the road to Oxmarsh, and we are done." Drusilla closed the ledger. "No," she said. "The one at your hearth is named and counted and Kept, and she is yours now, because you named her and a named child belongs to whoever spoke the name. That part of the Bond is older than the rest and I cannot undo it. What I can offer you is the office. Stay. Be the midwife of Grithfen, as six women were before you, and keep the count with me while I live, and hold the book when I am gone, and bring the next Bride's child ashore when the water is ready, and die here an old woman with a roof over your head. That is the offer. It is the same offer that was made to every woman whose name is in that column, and none of them ever found a way out of it that did not cost more than they had." Eudora sat in the cold chapel with the lamp between them and the two books on the desk and did the arithmetic, slowly, the way she did everything. Then she stood up, and took the lamp, and did not take the ledger, and said the only thing that was left to her that had not yet been said in that room. "I will not keep the count," she said. "And I will not walk out to the gate on a spring night and let the water have me, and I will not go out with the ebb in a hollow boat. I will take the child off this land, because she is the whole of the Bond, and a parish that has no one to hear the water has no one to tell it whom to take. I am not Loveday, Mrs. Rennock. Loveday played your game and lost and died for it. I am going to take the board off the table." Drusilla looked at her for a long moment and then did something Eudora had never seen her do. She bowed her head, once, the way an old woman bows to a thing she has decided not to fight, and on her face when she raised it there was the terrible tired peace that Eudora had last seen on the face of a woman standing waist-deep in a channel in her nightdress. "Then go," Drusilla said. "Go tonight, before the tide. And when it takes you, remember that I offered you a roof and a book and a life, and that you chose the reed bed." Eudora took the lamp and went out of the chapel into the cold and did not look back, and behind her she heard Drusilla Rennock close the two books one after the other, the thin one and the green one, and set them down on the desk, and the sound of them coming down was the smallest sound in the world and the heaviest. She walked home under a sky paling toward dawn with the village sleeping around her and the Skein running out under the boards, and she thought about the seven women in that column and about how each of them must have stood where she stood now, in the dark, deciding, and about how the parish had outlasted all of them and would outlast her, and she thought about the child in her house and the ford and the dry road to Oxmarsh, and she did not sleep. ---