第7章 The Cost of Breaking

The cost of her looking through the forbidden door arrived on the seventh day, and it arrived not at her but at her family, which was the way of the house and which she should have known. It came in the form of a letter from Amias, brought up the hill by the carrier, and Romilly read it standing in the long hall with her coat still on because she had taken it from the boy at the door and had not thought to take off anything else. Her brother's hand was careful and young, and this is what it said. That their mother was worse, and that the doctor had come twice, and that the sanatorium at Wexley had sent word asking when the first payment would be made, because the arrangement had been made through Mr. Lodegrave and Mr. Lodegrave, when Amias went to his office, had been sorry to say that there had been a difficulty, and that the difficulty concerned his sister's conduct at the Hall, and that the payment would be delayed until the matter was resolved. She read it twice. Then she took it upstairs and stood in the corridor above the great room and waited, and when the Keeper came up from the flats at dusk with the sea on his coat she did not let him pass. Explain this, she said, and held out the letter. He took it and read it with his face giving nothing away, and then he folded it and handed it back. Your mother's care is not in question, he said. The sanatorium will be paid. Lodegrave speaks for the estate's purse and I speak for the estate's rules, and he has put the two of them at odds over your curiosity, and he has done it to frighten you, and it has worked. It has worked, she said, because my mother is dying and you made me break a rule you wrote yourself and then crossed out and then used against me. He looked at her a long moment in the failing light, and then he did something she had not seen him do. He turned and walked into the great room and closed the door, and she followed him, because she was finished with being left outside of doors. I will tell you how this house works, he said, standing at the window with his back to her, the way he always stood. It has a Keeper, and it has a mistress, and it has a purse, and the three of them did not always sit easily in one house. Honoria holds the blood and the rules. Lodegrave holds the law and the money, and he has held it for thirty years, and he has grown fond of holding it. And I hold the wall and the evening and the silence, and I hold them because if I do not, something else in this house will, and I have seen what happens when something else in this house does. She stood in the middle of the room with the letter crushed in her fist. What happens, she said. People are kept, he said, and not only the dead. The fire cracked. He turned from the window and for the first time since she had come to Withergrave he looked at her directly and for longer than a moment, and she saw that his stillness, which she had taken for ice, was in truth the stillness of a man holding a door shut, and that he had been holding it a long time. Your mother will be paid, he said. I will see to it tonight, myself, and Lodegrave will be told that the purse of this estate answers to the rules of this estate, and not the other way around. And tomorrow you will help me at the wall again, and the day after that you will do it alone, because there will come an evening I cannot, and you will need to know how. She stared at him. You would let me near the wall alone. I would let you near it with me, he said. That is not the same thing, and it will never be the same thing, and you would be wise to remember it. That night she heard him leave the house, and from her window she watched a lantern go down the hill toward the village, down the road she had walked up a week before, and she stood in the cold of her room and understood, slowly and against her will, that the Keeper of Withergrave had gone to keep a promise he had made to her, and that he had gone at night, and that the rules of this house did not permit it, and that she was watching a rule being broken for her sake. She did not sleep. Near dawn she heard the lantern come back, and she lay still in the dark and listened to the house settle over the returning footsteps, and when the light came up grey over the flats she went down to the great room and found a note on the table in the small precise hand. Your mother is paid to the year's end, and the doctor will attend her twice a week, and it is done. You owe me nothing for it that you do not already owe. But learn the wall. There will be an evening when it must be kept and I cannot keep it, and on that evening the house will look to you. She stood a long time at the window after the letter came, and she did what she always did with a thing too large to hold: she broke it into columns and added them. Her mother's lungs. The sanatorium. The payment that had come and then stopped and then come again. The Keeper who had gone down the hill at night to keep a promise and broken a rule of his own house to do it. No column she could build added up to a man who was simply the instrument of a sale. She did not know what he was. She had begun, unwillingly, to suspect that he was a man standing in the doorway of a burning house, holding it open for everyone else and keeping the fire on his own side, and she hated how much of her wanted to walk toward that door. The house had a way of answering questions with the weather. Ask it about a debt and it gave you a tide. Ask it about a bride and it gave you a rule. And behind every answer there stood the same three figures, the old woman who held the blood, the soft man who held the purse, and the grey man who held the door, and none of the three of them had ever told the whole of it to any of the others, which meant that the only person in Withergrave who had begun to hold all three threads at once was a fisherman's daughter with a mended cuff. She read it and folded it and put it in the drawer of the tall table where she kept the things she did not know what to do with, which by then held three items, the letter, the nine rules, and this, and she stood at the window with her hand still on the drawer and watched the tide slide out over the flats, patient and grey and endless, and thought that she had come to this house to be used, and that she was being used, and that she could not for the life of her make herself believe it was the house that was using her. ---