第12章 The Name-Cloth

She waited two days, because she had learned that in Withergrave haste was a kind of noise and noise was a kind of breaking, and on the third night, when the house had closed itself and the tide was out and the Keeper lay still in his room with the salt drying on his sleeve, she went to the west wing. The corridor there was cold and sloped and the boards over the windows let in the moon in long stripes, and she walked it slowly with a candle shielded by her hand. Past the gallery. Past the shut rooms. To the far end, where the passage narrowed and the ceiling dropped and the air grew thick and sweet and wrong, the smell of a sickroom, the smell of closed windows and old medicine and a body that had not been let out of doors in a long time. There was a door at the end, and it was not locked. It was barred on the outside, which was worse. Romilly stood before it with the candle and listened, and after a while she heard breathing on the other side, slow and shallow, and then a voice, so thin it might have been the house settling, that said, You are the new one. She did not answer. She had been warned not to answer, and she had learned that warning had weight in this house. She put her eye to the latch hole and looked through. In the light of a single candle she saw a woman in a chair by a cold window, wrapped in shawls, her hair the color of the shawls and her face the color of the window, and the woman was not old. She was perhaps thirty, and she had been beautiful, and she was the laughing woman from the portrait, aged ten years by seven years of a shut room. She turned her head toward the door, toward the light, and her eyes were clear and steady and entirely sane, which was the worst thing of all. Ilsabeth, Romilly said, before she could stop herself. Yes, the woman said. And you are Romilly Draycott, and your name is on the cloth, and they have brought you here the same way they brought me, with a debt and a promise and a husband who will not tell you the truth until it is too late. She coughed and pressed a hand to her chest and went on, because she had clearly been waiting a long time to say these words to someone who could carry them out of the room. Listen to me, because you will not be able to come back. The Confirming is not a blessing. It is a door, and on one side of it a bride becomes free and on the other side the Keeper pays. Ask him what the Keeper pays. Ask him what the book says happens when the heir is confirmed. Ask him why I am still here and why they told the village I drowned crossing the water, and when he tells you, do not believe the part where he says it cannot be helped. The candle guttered. Down the corridor, somewhere in the house, a door opened. Romilly stepped back from the barred door, and made herself go, and she was halfway down the west wing when Mrs. Pye came around the corner with a lamp and a face like a closed fist. You are out of your bed, the housekeeper said. I could not sleep, Romilly said. Mrs. Pye looked at her for a while in the lamplight, and then she did a thing that Romilly did not expect. She looked down, and her fist of a face loosened, and she said, very quietly, out of the side of her mouth, like a woman passing a coin in a crowd. The Keeper keeps his own counsel and the mistress keeps her own keys, but there is a book in the Room of Years that is not the ledger and not the cloth, and it is bound in black and it has been in this house three hundred years, and if you want the truth of the Confirming then it is there and it is the only place it is. Then she straightened, and her face closed again, and she said, loudly, Go to bed before the mistress hears you, and she walked Romilly back to the east wing herself and shut the door. Romilly sat on the edge of her bed in the dark with the candle out and her hands in her lap and thought about a woman who had lived in a shut room for seven years with the portrait of herself laughing on the wall of a gallery she was not allowed to see. She thought about a book bound in black, and a rule she had kept and a rule she had broken, and a promise she had made to a man in the dark, and about what it meant that the only person in this house who had told her the truth from the first was the man who had been paid to keep her from it. And she thought about Ilsabeth's voice through the door, clear and sane and patient, and how a woman could stay sane for seven years in a room with a barred door, and the answer came to her with a small cold certainty. Because she had something to wait for. Because she was waiting for someone to come up the hill, and now someone had. She sat in the dark room a long while after that and turned it all over. A woman in a shut room. A girl with no acknowledged name. A keeper who paid for a door out of his own arm. And behind all of it, patient and cold and three hundred years old, a book that said a bride could not leave until she was confirmed and that a keeper was released when the heir was named, and that no living soul had ever been asked to read the two rules together and say what they meant. She thought about her own name at the bottom of the cloth, stitched in new white thread, and she thought that she had walked up the eastern rise believing she was paying a debt, and that she had been paying something else all along, though no one had ever told her what. She thought about the portrait with its two empty hooks beside it, and about the fact that three hundred years of Withergrave brides had names stitched into a cloth and not one of them had a picture on the wall, and she understood, lying in the dark, why Ilsabeth had laughed in her painting. A woman who laughs in this house is a woman the house cannot paint a second time. The laughing portrait was not a picture of a bride who belonged here. It was a picture of a bride who was never going to, and it had hung on that wall for seven years as the one thing in the whole of the west wing that the house had never been able to take down and had never been able to keep. She lay down, and she did not sleep, and near dawn she heard the tide come in and the house close its doors one by one in order, and she thought, before she finally slept, that she had stopped being afraid of this house at some point, and had started being afraid for it, which was a different thing and a worse one, because fear for a thing makes you stay. ---