第20章 The Turning Tide

The last night of the year came in with a wind off the sea, and the district came up the hill one more time, and this time they did not come to eat. They came because the word had gone down the marsh road that the bride of Withergrave had something to say, and in a place like Marrowgate a word like that travels faster than a tide, and by the time the chapel bell rang the great room was full to the walls with faces Romilly had known her whole life. The tenants. The fishermen. The farmers off the marsh. Old women who had nursed her as a baby and young men who had courted her at the fair and been refused. And at the front, in a grey dress with a mended cuff because she had kept it all year for this, holding a folded paper against her heart, Romilly stood where a bride of Withergrave had never stood, which was in the middle of the room, facing the table, instead of behind the Keeper with her eyes down. Honoria brought out the book and the cloth. Lodegrave sat at the end of the table in his neat black coat with his soft hands folded, and Dr. Sallow stood by the door with his bag in his hand and his eyes on the room, and by some arithmetic of her own that Romilly had arranged three days before, there was a constable from the mainland standing at the back of the hall in a plain coat, brought across the water by a letter and a promise and a doctor who had spent a life in other people's sickrooms. Severin took the cloth in his hands and did not look at her. He had been told to hold it, and he held it, and his hands were steady the way they had been steady for eleven years, and that steadiness was the bravest thing she had ever seen. The Confirming began with the reading of the ledger, and Honoria read it, the year's dead and the year's birth, and when she came to the binding she read two names, Ilsabeth Withergrave and Romilly Draycott, and the room shifted. Then she said, Bring the heir, and the woman who had kept the child all year brought Merisel in and stood her before the table, and the district looked at the small girl with the pale green eyes and understood, all at once, what this house had been keeping behind its doors for seven years, and a sound went through the great room like wind through wheat. Then Honoria said, and her voice carried to the back of the hall, Let the bride be asked. And Romilly was asked. She did not say no. She had spent a week deciding what to say instead of no, and now the moment was on her and she stood in the middle of a room full of the only people she had ever loved and took the folded paper from against her heart and opened it, and she read it aloud. She read the bond of the winter she was born, in which a house had bargained for an infant that could not speak. She read the footnote in the Keeper's hand that said a word could mean freed or returned and that a family had always read it the way it wished. She read the three leaves that had been added to a book three hundred years old, and the pedigree on the first, and the names of the dead and the living on the second, and on the third the scheme of a man who had turned a poor man's old bond into a debt and a debt into a marriage and a marriage into a death, with a figure in pounds beside every step. When she finished, the great room was silent, and into the silence Lodegrave rose, and his soft voice had gone soft and thin, and he said that the paper was a forgery and the woman was the wife of the Keeper and there was no document in the world that could stand against the book of the house of Withergrave. And Dr. Sallow opened the door at the back of the hall, and the constable came forward, and the district, which had spent three hundred years being afraid of a dark house on a hill, did the thing that Romilly had been counting on for a week and did not dare to hope for until she saw it happen. It stayed. It did not go home to its fires and its doors. It stood in the great room of Withergrave and watched a rich man be taken by the coat by a plain man from the mainland, and it did not lift a hand to either of them, and that staying was worth more than a thousand papers. They took Lodegrave down the hill. They brought Ilsabeth down from the west wing, thin and clear-eyed and leaning on Mrs. Pye, and when she saw her daughter she knelt on the floor of the great room and held her, and the district looked away, because some things are not for a room of strangers. And Honoria, the last of the true blood, stood at the black table with her book and her magnifier and watched her own house be opened like a locked room, and did not stop it, and said nothing at all. And then the tide came. It came the way old Crispin had always said it would, faster than any memory of it, faster than the stakes and the markers allowed, and it came over the flats in a long grey wall under the winter moon and broke against the seawall below the house, and the house felt it. The great room tilted, just once, like a floor on a ship. Somewhere below, in the low room under the waterline, the twenty-seven doors took the first of it. And Severin Withergrave, who had held the cloth through all of it and not let it go, went white to the lips and set the cloth down on the table and said, very quietly, so that only Romilly heard, The account is open. They confirmed the heir, and no one went to the water, and the account is open, and it will take what it is owed another way. She caught his arm. Then we go to the wall, she said. They went down through the house together, past the kitchens and the iron door, and the water met them on the flags, cold and black and rising, and the lamp Severin carried threw its light across the low round room and along the wall of numbered doors, and every one of them was still shut, and the tide was at the third course of the stone. Severin set the lamp on the table and stood before the wall the way he had stood before it every evening for eleven years, and he spoke the names, all twenty-seven, slowly, one for each door, and the water kept coming, and when he reached the last name, which was Ilsabeth, and then the name after it, which was Merisel, and then a name that was not on the wall at all, which was Romilly, the water stopped. It stopped the way a held breath stops. The room went still and the tide stood where it stood, and for one long moment Romilly thought the account had been paid by the three of them standing there together, and then she saw the far side of the low room, where she had never looked, and where there was a fourth wall she had never counted, and in that wall there was one more door. It was not iron and it was not numbered in brass. It was old wood, older than the house, black with salt, and it stood at the very bottom of the wall where the tide touched it twice a day, and it was standing wide open, and the sea was going in. Severin turned and looked at it and his face, which had been still through everything, was not still now. That door, he said, has not been open in three hundred years. Romilly took the lamp from the table and raised it, and in the light of it she saw, past the open door, a stone stair going down into black water, and on the lowest step, just above the line of the flood, there lay a folded paper, dry, though the sea had been over that step a moment before. It had her name on it. She knew the hand before she touched it, the small precise clerkly hand that had written nine rules and crossed out a tenth, and beneath her name, in the same hand, in ink that was still wet, there were three words, and the three words were not a rule. They were, We are not done. Far above them, in the great room, through the stone and the water and the whole height of the sleeping house, somebody began to knock on the front door of Withergrave, slow and steady, at the exact hour when every door in the house was supposed to stay shut.