第10章 Sureties

Plough Monday came and the frost broke and the fen flooded grey, and Aldith began the work of finding men who would stand for her. In the bishop's court, as in every court she had ever written for, no person could answer a plea alone. A plaintiff or a defendant must be bound to appear, and to be bound he or she must find pledges, and a pledge was a man of substance who would stake his goods upon your showing up. A man found his pledges among his kin and his guild and his neighbours. A woman found hers the way she found everything, by asking, and being refused, and asking again. She went first to the reeve of Rushbourne, who owed the priory nothing and paid the lord everything, and who received her in his own house with his cap in his hand and his eyes on the fire. "I would stand for you gladly," he said, "and I would lose my holding for it before the year's out. Sir Fulk's reeve spoke to me at Christmas. He said the town has no quarrel with the priory and less with a lord, and a wise reeve keeps his field in the field he can plough." He turned his cap over. "Ask the parchmenter. He owns no land the lord can take." The parchmenter owned no land, and said the same thing more slowly, and in the end, when she had asked him three times and shown him the marginal seal and let him feel the shave with his own thumb, he said yes, and asked her to keep his name off any bill until the day it was needed, so that the lord would not hear it early and lean on him before he had spoken it. Warin said yes before she had finished the sentence. Father Reynold said yes and then spent an hour telling her how little his yes was worth. The fourth pledge came from a place she had not expected. On the Tuesday she was in the scriptorium, working on her bill, when a boy brought her a folded slip of paper with no seal, and on it, in a hand she recognized because she had seen it on the porch board every market day for nine years, was written: *If it is true that the false words are the fresher, then I have been used. I will stand.* It was signed with the letter A, and Achard never came to her house and never spoke to her again before Candlemas, but on the day of the court he stood where he had put his name, and he stood with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the floor, and Aldith, watching him, understood that a man may be vain and jealous and still hate to be made a fool of more than he hates a woman. Four pledges, then, and the parchmenter's was the weakest and Achard's the strangest, and none of them was worth the whole of one lord. The prioress pledged the house's silver-gilt chalice, which was the treasure of the sacristy and which Godith surrendered without a word, wrapping it herself in cloth and setting it in the chest with the cords. Aldith watched the old woman's hands around the chalice and understood the size of what was being wagered. If she lost, the chalice was forfeit, and more than the chalice. Father Reynold told her plainly, one evening, what the law did to those who falsified charters, because he believed she had a right to know the shape of the thing she was standing in front of. "A clerk is degraded," he said. "A layman loses what the court pleases to take. I have read of a man in the bishop's court at Marlhaugh, forty years past, who forged a deed of land, and the court took his right hand at the wrist, and he was a scribe, and after it he could not write, and he begged the town for three years and then he died. If you are found to have scraped that book, that is the shape of it. It does not matter that the book is a woman's book and the land a house's land. A false writing is a false writing." "And a woman?" "A woman who falsifies a deed is taken as a man is taken," said Reynold. "The court likes to make an example of a woman. It makes the example longer." She went home and sat by her fire and looked at her own right hand, which was a plain hand, a little broad at the knuckles from holding the pen, with a callus on the middle finger where the quill rested, and which had written more words in eleven years than most men wrote in a lifetime. She looked at it the way she would look at a tool she was about to lend out and might not get back. And then, because she was her father's daughter and her father had taught her that fear was a debt you could pay later, she turned the hand over and took up the pen with it and went on with the bill. The bill was her chief work that January, and she made it the way she made a book, because a book was the only kind of argument she had ever been allowed to finish. It began with the leaf, and the day she found the shave, and the hour, and what the raking light showed. It went on to the ink, and how a fresh ink runs under water and an old ink holds, and it set out the test so plainly that any clerk could perform it on the leaf itself in open court and see which words ran. It went on to the bounds and the gap in the line where the mill had been cut away. It set down the marginal seal and the turned letters of the founder's name, and it named the one place in the shire where that name was written wrong, so that the court might look at it with its own eyes. And then it came to the thing that Aldith had turned over a hundred times in the dark, the thing that she believed would save her or fail her, and she wrote it out as plainly as she could, because a plain thing said plainly was the only kind of thing a court could not help but hear. The false words, she wrote, are the words that take the fen from the priory and give it to the lord. The fresh ink is on the false words. The scrape is under the false words. A woman who means to steal a fen for a house of nuns writes fresh ink on the words that keep the fen for the nuns. She does not write fresh ink on the words that give it away. Whoever scraped this leaf wrote the words that served the lord, not the house. Therefore the forger was the lord's, and not the house's, and not mine. She read it over and it held. It held the way a good joint holds, not because it was clever but because it was square. That night, late, a rider came up the frozen lane and knocked, and it was a lay brother from Cresswell with a letter from the precentor, and the letter was short and had been written in haste. *The bishop's commissioner is returned to this house before his time. The box shall be opened at Candlemas week, not after. Come as early as you can. Bring your own copy of the leaf, for the commissioner is a man who believes books and not women, and your book will have to speak for you because I fear that you will not be allowed to.* Under the words, in a smaller hand, Ilbert had written a postscript that Aldith read three times before she believed it. *Also, I have found among the abbey's charters one granted by the founder of your house to this abbey, of the same year, and it is sealed with the founder's seal, and I have looked at the legend round the edge, and it is not written the way your register writes it. Come and see.* ---