第16章 The Bargain Behind the Debt

She went down the hill at night, alone, in the frozen dark, and no one stopped her, and that frightened her more than being stopped would have. The cottage was smaller than she remembered and colder, and her mother was in the bed by the fire with her hair spread on the pillow and her hands on the coverlet and her eyes open, watching the door, as if she had known the exact hour her daughter would come. Amias was asleep in the chair. Romilly knelt by the bed and took her mother's hand, and her mother's hand was light and dry and warm, and for a while neither of them said anything. You came down the hill, her mother said. I always was stubborn, Romilly said. Yes, her mother said. So was your father. And this is the thing I promised him I would never tell you, and I have kept it twenty-four years, and I am going to break it tonight because I am going to die and a promise kept into the grave is only a hoard. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at her daughter with the clear tired eyes of a woman who had decided to stop carrying something. The winter you were born, she said, a man came down from the Hall. Not the Keeper, and not Honoria. A solicitor, or a man who worked for one. He came to your father with a paper, and the paper said this. The house of Withergrave was failing and needed a bride, and the bride must be a girl of the district and of good health, and the man offered your father two hundred pounds, in advance, for a promise. What promise, Romilly said, though she already knew. That when the girl was grown, the house would have her, her mother said. That she would be kept for the house, and given to it when it called, and that the money was the bond. Your father took the paper and he took the money and he signed nothing, and then he put the money in a box under the floor and he never spent a penny of it, and he told me to swear that if the house ever came for you we would send it back, every coin, and he swore that no child of his would ever be kept for a rich man's name. And the debt, Romilly said. The two hundred pounds he owed. There was no debt, her mother said. There was never any debt. He borrowed nothing and he spent nothing. When the house came for you the first time, when you were small and the money was still in the box, your father went up the hill himself and threw the whole of it back at them in their own hall, and he came home white as the wall and would not speak of it, and after that the paper went away, and we thought it was over. It was not over. Somewhere in the years since, someone at that Hall took the old paper up again and turned a bond into a debt, and called in the principal and the interest of a loan that never was, and made it so that the only way a poor man's daughter could pay it was to walk up the hill the way her father had refused to let her walk. Romilly knelt by the bed with her mother's hand in hers and felt the whole of the last three months rearrange itself. The letter with the cream paper. The sum on the first page. Severin across the table in the firelight, saying, You are in debt to us. Honoria saying, you signed it. And her father, eleven years of a debt he never questioned, because he knew the debt was a lie and there was no way on earth to say so without naming the bargain behind it, and naming the bargain would have put his daughter's name on a cloth. She did not sleep. Near dawn she kissed her mother's forehead and left Amias a note and walked back up the eastern rise in the grey cold with the frost on the hedges, and she did not go to her room. She went through the house in the early dark to the library, where the Keeper of Withergrave was already at the table with the estate books open, as if he had been sitting there all night, and he looked up, and he saw her face, and he set down the pen. You knew, she said. I knew the debt was made, he said. I did not know the bond behind it. I want you to believe that. I do not care what you want, she said. You signed the contract that sold me into this house on a lie. You stood at the table and told me my father borrowed two hundred pounds, and you kept the accounts of this estate, and you did not once, in three months, when I asked you again and again, tell me that the sum you were collecting was a fraud. Whatever you feel about this house, whatever you are to it, you are its Keeper. You kept its books. You kept its rules. You kept me in the dark. She stood across the table from him and let the words come out flat and hard so they would not come out broken. I stood in a room full of shadows and told you I would sign, and I signed because my mother was dying and my brother had nowhere to go, and you let me sign a lie. She had learned, in the weeks since she walked up the eastern rise, that Withergrave was a house of two weathers. There was the weather of the rules, which was cold and plain and never once lied. And there was the weather beneath it, which was warm and soft and full of men who folded their hands and called a dying woman arithmetic. The second weather had sold her and the first had kept her, and she stood now in the library looking at a man who belonged to neither and to both, and she thought that the house had done to him what it had done to her, which was to take a person and give them a single job, and let the job stand in for everything else, until there was no one underneath it. She thought about the child, then. Merisel, seven years old, with the pale green eyes and a name the house would not read. Everything in this room came back to her in the end, the way every road in a small district leads down to the sea, and the sea in this house had a face and a name and no acknowledged place in it at all. He did not defend himself. That was the worst of him, always. He sat at the table with his hands flat on the ledger and let her say it, all of it, and when she was done he said, only, There is nothing I can say that will make this anything else. So I will not waste your time trying. The Room of Years is unlocked. It has been unlocked since the first morning. It has no lock, because the lock was never the point. The point was that you would not want to open it. He looked up at her, and his face was as still as it had been the first day, and his eyes were not still at all. You want the truth, and you deserve it more than anyone who has ever lived in this house. Go and take it. I will not stop you. And when you have read what is in that book, you will know why I could not say it out loud, and you will still be right to hate me, and I will not ask you not to. ---