第14章 The Count

They buried Brother Ansfrid in the small ground beyond the garden wall, in ground so cold the gravediggers could not dig it and had to lay him in a stone trough under a blanket of pine, and the abbot said the prayers while the snow came down, and there were eight of them now, and then seven, and the house that had been nine when she arrived was smaller each week. Prior Hartwig did not come to the burial. He was in the church. Aloisia cleaned the face of the judge on the day they buried Ansfrid, because there was no time left to be delicate and because the judge was the last great darkness on the wall, a black sun of soot and resin at the center of everything. It was the hardest cleaning of her life. The judge's face had been varnished three times and each varnish had cracked into the next, and the soot had gone into the cracks like ink into a cut, and she had to work in squares no larger than a coin, lifting a century in each pass, checking with the magnifier at every square, and she did it for two days with her shoulders on fire and her eyes dry, and at the end of the second day the face of the judge came up out of the black. It was not the Christ of the tradition. The judge sat on his rainbow with his hand raised and his hand lowered, but the face under the varnish was the face of a man, a particular man, heavy-jawed and close-set and grim, painted from a living sitter rather than from a type. She knew before Ansfrid could not tell her (he was under the pine by then) whose face it was. There was a portrait of him hanging in the abbot's room, in an old copy, with a date under it. 1722. A likeness of the abbot who had been before Romuald's predecessor's predecessor. A likeness of Emmerich. The painter who came up in the spring after the arrangement had been told to amend the wall, and he had amended it, and then—because he was a good painter, and because he had been in the house for the season and had learned what the house was—he had given the judge of the living and the dead the face of the man who had done the deed. He had buried it under three varnishes and a century of soot, where no one would look, and left it there like a confession the house could not read. She stood before it a long while with the lamp in her hand. The house had been looking at this wall for three hundred years, and had painted over it seven times, and had told itself it was hiding the hidden, when what it was hiding was the judge. The face of the crime was at the center of the picture, and it was the face of the house. She went to find the abbot and found him in the corridor outside the church, and he was not alone. Prior Hartwig stood at the church door with a broad horsehair brush in his hand—the brush from the lime store—and behind him, in the church, on the fresh-cleaned wall, a band of wet lime was already running down the plaster in gray fingers, over the green sleeve and the bound company and the blank face and the face of Emmerich, and the lime was drying even as she watched, and where it dried the wall went pale and the figures ghosted and began to go out like candles. She said his name. Hartwig said, I am not a vandal. He said it quietly. I am a man who has watched this house die by inches for forty years, and I will not watch it die whole. You have given it a name, and a name is a counting, and a counting is a door, and I have spent my life keeping that door shut. He did not raise his voice. He said, You may hate me for this, and God may hate me for this, and I have made my peace with one of you. The abbot put a hand on the prior's arm, and the prior did not resist him, and the brush fell out of his hand and struck the flags, and the sound of it in the cold corridor was the loudest thing Aloisia had heard in that house. The lime set. It set fast, because lime sets by its own law and no man commands it, and by Compline that evening two-thirds of what she had cleaned was ghosted and gone, and she went to bed with the loss sitting in her chest like a swallowed stone, and she did not sleep. In the morning, the wall had changed. She saw it before she had her coat off, as she had seen the hand on the first patch before the house was divided. The lime had not held. It had not fallen, and it had not been washed, and no one had touched it, and yet where it had ghosted the figures there were figures again, and the wall had come back through the lime the way water comes back through paper, and it had come back changed: the company of the hidden was larger by three, and among them, at the edge of the crowd, stood a figure in a black habit with a broad brush in its hand and its face turned away, and the figure was the shape and the height and the stoop, exact in every line, of Prior Hartwig. The lime had not held, and the mortar of it had not held, and the figures had come back through it, and she spent the morning photographing the recovery of a wall she had thought she had lost, and it was not the wall she had cleaned, and every change in it ran in the same direction. The house had tried to veil it a third time, by an old man's hand in the dark, and the wall had simply counted the old man. She went over the whole surface with the lamp, field by field, and made a chart of what had returned and what had not, and the parts that had not returned were the parts the prior had never reached, and the parts that had returned were altered, and by the end of the morning she had stopped being able to call it restoration and had begun, in her own head, to call it revision. She found him in his cell that afternoon, sitting upright on his bed with his hands folded in his lap, his face turned to the wall of the cell, and he was alive, and he could not be made to eat, and he did not speak again in her hearing, and he lived another eleven days. ---