第14章 The Winter Feast

Every year, three days after the Settling, the Withergraves opened the Hall to the district, and every year the district came up the hill, and this year Romilly stood at the top of the great stair beside the Keeper of Withergrave and understood that she was about to be looked at by every person she had ever known. The feast was not a kindness. Honoria explained it to her the way she explained everything, briefly and without mercy. The district must see the bride, she said. A bride kept behind the door is a bride the district invents stories about, and a district that is inventing stories is a district that will one day come up the hill with rope. So we show them the bride, and we feed them, and we let them look, and then they go home and sleep, and the house is safe another year. They came at dusk, the tenants and the farmers and the fishermen and half of Marrowgate, and the great room filled with the smell of wet wool and wood smoke and hot food, and Romilly stood at the foot of the stair and received them one by one. She knew their faces. She had sold them fish and mended their nets with her father and sat in the back of their church. The women curtsied to her now. The men bowed. The old ones looked at her the way they looked at the Hall itself, with a respect that had fear at the bottom of it, and the young ones looked at her the way they had looked at her in the market two months before, and she saw in their faces the exact moment each of them remembered that she was no longer the girl who had sold them fish. Amias came. She saw him in the crowd before he saw her, and her heart went up and then down, because he was thin and his coat was older than it had been and he had the careful walk of a boy who has been carrying more than he should. When he reached her he stopped, and he looked at her grey dress and her pinned hair and the ring on her finger, and then he said, in the loud, cracked voice of a seventeen-year-old trying not to cry in a room full of people, You look like a rich man's wife. I am a rich man's wife, she said, and took his arm and pulled him to the side of the room, and for a quarter of an hour she was not the bride of Withergrave at all, she was a sister, and she asked after their mother and he answered. She is not worse, he said, and she is not better, and the doctor comes twice a week like he said, and the sanatorium has taken the first payment and put her name on a list for the spring, and the money has been coming, Romilly, I do not know how but it has been coming, and Mother says tell your sister not to come down the hill until the year is out, and she says it every time I leave, she makes me promise. Romilly held that, and did not let it show on her face. Then go back up the hill tonight, she said, and tell her I am well, and tell her the year will pass, and do not ask her why she does not want me to come down, because I already know why. The feast went on. She ate and was seen to eat. She stood beside Severin while the district came past, and he was cold and civil and exact with every one of them, and she watched the way the room treated him, and understood for the first time that the district was afraid of the Keeper of Withergrave in a way it was not afraid of Honoria, and that the fear was not the fear of a rich man or a hard one. It was the fear you give a man who walks the flats at midnight and keeps a door shut that everyone has agreed not to talk about. Late in the evening Dr. Sallow found her by the fire. He was the Wexley doctor, the one who had been sent twice a week to her mother, and he was middle-aged and careful and had the tired kind eyes of a man who had spent a life in other people's sickrooms. He stood beside her with a glass he did not drink from and said, quietly, You are the Draycott girl. I am the Withergrave bride, she said. You are the Draycott girl, he said, and I have been to your mother's house, and I have seen the payments that come from this Hall, and I have watched a house pay for a poor woman's lungs for three months without sending her a single line of writing that says why. He looked at the fire. I am not a man who tells other people's business, he said. But I will tell you one thing, because your mother asked me to, and she could not write it herself. She said to tell you that your father went up this hill the winter you were born, and what he brought back with him was not a debt. She said he came home with a promise and a sum of money he never spent, and the two of them were the same thing, and if you ever go into the room they keep with the books, you should look not at the debts but at the year, and the year is the year you were born. He said nothing more after that, and left before she could ask, and Romilly stood at the fire for a long time with the feast going on around her and a cold hand closing on the back of her neck. Dr. Sallow's words stayed with her for the rest of the evening and would not be put down. A promise and a sum of money and the year she was born. She moved through the feast with a smile that cost her, and she watched the district watch her, and she thought about her father standing in his own hall and throwing back a bond and coming home white as the wall and never speaking of it, and she understood that whatever her father had refused, the house had been patient, and patience was the one weapon the poor could never match. She caught Severin's eye across the room once, near midnight, and he read her face the way he read a page, and he did not come to her and did not rescue her, because he had learned that she did not want to be rescued. He only stood where she could see him, steady and grey and patient, and that, she found, was worth more to her than rescue. The guests left before midnight. The house closed its doors one by one. And when the last of them were gone down the hill, she stood in the great room with the fire banked and the candles going out, and Severin came and stood beside her without a word, and they watched the lanterns of the district go down the marsh road in a long slow line, and after a while he held out his hand, and she took it, and they stood like that in the dark with the house quiet around them and the tide turning below the wall, and neither of them said the thing that both of them were thinking, which was that the winter was passing, and that the Settling was behind them, and that the Confirming was not. ---