第3章 The Threshold

The wedding was performed three days later in the chapel of Withergrave, and it took nine minutes, and Romilly counted them. There was no music and no flowers and no guests, only Mr. Lodegrave with the book and Crispin standing at the door with his hands folded and a woman in black whose name she had not been told, and the chapel was cold and smelled of stone and salt and old candle smoke, and at the far end a stained window let in a lake of grey light that fell across the altar and did not warm it. The vows were the old ones, the long ones, and she said them with her chin up because she had decided on the walk down the hill that she would not say them with her eyes closed. Severin Withergrave said his vows the way he did everything, exactly and without heat, and when it was done and the book was closed he looked at her and said, You are of this house now. Then he turned and walked out, and she followed him, because there was nowhere else to go. The Hall in the daylight was a different animal from the Hall at night, and worse. Night had hidden its size. Day revealed it. She was given a room in the east wing, a tall cold room with a bed of dark wood and a window that looked down on the flats, and Mrs. Pye, the housekeeper, brought her a basin of hot water and a set of keys on an iron ring and laid them on the table without ceremony. These are yours, Mrs. Pye said. For your room, and the linen press, and the small stair. They will open nothing else. What do the other keys open, Romilly said. Mrs. Pye looked at her the way a woman looks at a child who has asked the wrong question in the wrong house. The other keys, she said, belong to Mr. Withergrave. She said the name the way she might have said the name of a storm. Then she smoothed the bedspread and left, and Romilly was alone in a room three times the size of the cottage parlor, and she sat on the edge of the bed and did not cry, because crying would have been a waste of the little strength she had and because she had promised herself, on the walk down the hill in her head, that this house would not get that from her. At dusk Crispin came for her. He led her down the main stair and through the long hall and into the great room, where a fire burned in a hearth tall enough to stand in and where the family, such as it was, had gathered. She had expected many. There were four. There was Mrs. Pye, standing with her hands folded. There was Crispin, at the door. There was a woman in a high-backed chair with the firelight carving her face into flint, and there was Severin, standing at the window with his back to the room and the last of the light dying over the flats beyond the glass. The woman in the chair did not rise. She looked at Romilly for a long time, from the hem of her dress to the crown of her head, and Romilly felt the look the way one feels a hand on the back of the neck. So, the woman said. This is the bride. She was old and straight and wore black and her voice was the voice of a woman who had been the most important person in a room for so long that she had forgotten what it was to be otherwise. I am Honoria Withergrave. I am the last of the true blood of this house, and while I live, what I say in this room is the law of this room, beneath only the rules. Beneath the rules, Romilly said. You listen, Honoria said, with the faintest approval, which was worse than disapproval. Good. There is a thing I will say to you once, and then I will not say it again, because a thing said twice becomes a thing argued. You are not the first bride this house has taken from outside the blood. You know that. The village knows it. What the village does not know is what became of the others, and the village will never know, and neither will you, and you will not ask. That is not a rule. That is a kindness. Romilly said nothing. Honoria watched her a moment longer, then turned her eyes to the fire, and the interview, if it had been one, was over. Severin spoke from the window without turning. The rules will be taught to you at first light. Learn them. He said it quietly and with no threat in it, which somehow made it the most threatening thing said in the room. That night she could not sleep, and near midnight she rose and went to the window and looked out over the flats. The tide was out and the moon was up and the whole of the estuary lay beneath her, pale and ribbed and endless, and far out at the edge of the light she saw a lantern moving, slow and steady, the way a man walks who is checking a line of stakes. The Keeper walked the flats at midnight. She watched until the lantern turned and came back, and when it passed beneath her window she saw, for a moment, his upturned face, and she stepped back from the glass before she had decided to, and stood in the dark of the room with her heart working hard, and did not know why. In the morning she woke to frost on the inside of the window and to a knocking at her door. Mrs. Pye stood in the corridor with a lamp in one hand and a folded paper in the other. Mr. Withergrave's compliments, she said, and handed over the paper, and left. Romilly unfolded it by the cold light. On it, in a small precise hand, were written nine lines. One. Do not enter the Room of Years. Two. Keep the Sundown Rite. At the last light, be silent, and let no door stand open. Three. Do not go down to the flats alone after dark. Four. Do not speak of the house's business outside the house. Five. Do not touch the Name-Cloth. Six. Do not ask the servants about the family. Seven. Do not enter the east tower. Eight. Do not refuse the Confirming, when its hour comes. Nine. Do not leave Withergrave before the year is out. She went to the window and opened it a hand's width, and the cold came in off the flats and smelled of salt and iron and something older than either, and she stood breathing it and let the nine rules settle into her like a stone dropped into a well. She had lived all her life in a place where the rules were written in the weather and were simple: do not go out on a spring tide, do not trust a calm sea, do not leave a net down when the wind turns. This house had rules of the same kind, she thought, and the same reason, which was that something had once happened here that no one wanted to happen twice. She did not know what it was. She knew only that a house does not build nine walls of law around a thing it does not fear, and that the fear in Withergrave was old and careful and had been fed for three hundred years. She read the nine rules twice, the way she read the letter, and beneath the last one, in the same small hand, the Keeper of Withergrave had written a tenth line, which he had crossed through so hard that the pen had torn the paper, so that it could be read and could not be read. The ink said: If you are frightened, come to me. ---