第7章 The Register

Brother Ansfrid kept the archive in a room off the cloister that smelled of leather and damp wool and the particular sweetness of paper that has not been opened in a long while. He was old, bent, nearly blind in one eye, and he had the archivist's disease, which is the inability to leave a thing unread. He had watched Aloisia work for a week without speaking to her, and on the eighth day he met her in the corridor and said, in a voice like a hinge, You want to know who they were. She said yes. He led her into the archive and cleared a bench and laid out, in careful order, three books and a folder of loose leaves. The books were the annals of the house, kept by successive hands, and the oldest of them was written in a fine cramped script that she could not follow and did not need to, because Ansfrid translated as he turned the pages. In the year 1721, a visitation came to the valley. Officials of the prince, with soldiers, hunting a movement that had taken root in the villages—not a heresy exactly, Ansfrid said, or not only a heresy, but a devotion, a way of praying in which the people would not look upon the face of God in judgment but turned away, and said that to be saved one must turn one's face aside and be counted among those who were not seen. The officials called them the Children of the Averted Face, and the name was the worst thing about them, because it was accurate. The house sheltered them. Thirty or forty of them, or more; the annals are not careful with numbers here, as though the writer feared to be exact. They were hidden in the undercroft and in the old chapter house, and the brothers brought them bread and water and promised that when the search passed they would be let out and sent over the mountain. The search did not pass. Ansfrid turned the page and showed her a line that had been crossed out so heavily the nib had torn the paper. He said, The abbot of that year was Emmerich. A frightened man, or a careful one. When the officials returned a second time and threatened the house with dissolution, Emmerich made an arrangement. He gave the officials certain names. And the persons under the chapter house—there is no entry for what became of them. There is a gap in the annals of some forty years. The next hand begins with the wall. She asked about the wall. He said, The Doom was painted in the old church a generation before, by a painter who came up from the south and stayed the winter and left in the spring. It showed the judgment as it is always shown. But after the visitation, Emmerich had the left quadrant of the wall altered. The painter was not available. Another man was found. And the company of the blessed was amended—certain figures taken out, a saint put in their place—so that no one who looked at the wall could see what had happened to the persons who had been there. The wall was made to testify to the arrangement. She said, So the record was scrubbed. On paper and in paint. He said, On paper, in paint, and in the ground. The undercroft was sealed. The old chapter house was rebuilt. There is a place beneath the floor of the present chapter house that has not been opened since Emmerich's time, and a brother of that year wrote, in the margin of another book, one word. He turned the loose leaves and showed her. In a hand almost illegible, scratched across the margin, was a single word and a date, and under the word, pressed so hard that the letters showed on the back of the page, a name. The word was Counting. The name was Ursel. She asked who Ursel was. Ansfrid was quiet a long while. Then he said, A girl of the valley. Not one of the Children. She was in service to the house, and she was in the undercroft when the arrangement was made, and she was old enough to speak of what she had seen, and Emmerich, who was careful, did what careful men do with a witness they cannot afford. He said no more than that, and his one working eye was wet, and she did not make him say the rest. He showed her the tercentenary. In a later hand, in the annals of a hundred years ago, an entry recorded the day the wall had last been veiled, and beside it a marginal note in a different ink: When the third hundred is complete, the veil fails, and the count must be finished, or the house must finish it. No one knows which. The note was signed only with a cross. She asked what would happen at the feast of Saint Veylen, six months away. He said, That is when the third hundred is complete. The house has known it for a generation. The abbot has known it since he was a young man, and he has been waiting, the way a man waits who does not know whether he is waiting for a wedding or a funeral. She asked why they had waited so long to bring a conservator. He said, Because they could not agree that one should come at all. The prior forbade it for twenty years. And then the wall began to fail faster than the lime could hold it, and the abbot overruled him, and here you are. He paused, and his working eye moved over her face, and he said, You have the look of a woman who does not believe in the things she is finding. That is a good thing to be, in this house. It is also the only kind of person who could look at this wall honestly. A believer would see his own faith in it. A coward would see his own fear. You see only what is there. She said, And what is there? He said, I have read every word in this room, and I will tell you plainly: I do not know whether what is under that lime is a picture of a crime or the crime itself. In 1721 the house hid people, and the house hid its hiding, and the wall was made to lie. That much is certain. Beyond it, the annals stop being history and become something else, and I am too old to say what. At the door of the archive, with the smell of the old books behind her, she asked him the question that had been gathering all week. Why does the house veil the wall? He said, Because it counts. It has been counting since Emmerich's time. Every generation it is veiled, and the count is held still, and the house sleeps. Then the lime fails and the count resumes, and the house wakes, and it is worse each time. He looked at her with his working eye. The abbot believes that this time, if the wall is truly seen, once, by someone who is not of the house, the count will finish and the dead will be released. The prior believes that if it finishes, the dead will take the place of the living and the count will begin again, and never stop. And I believe he said nothing more. He is an old man, and he has read too much, and he no longer knows which of them is right. She asked what the wall wanted. He said, It wants to be looked at. That is all it has ever wanted. That is the danger. ---