第12章 The Night of the Chest

The men came on the last night of January, in the dark, with the fen still flooded and the road to Rushbourne a ribbon of mud. They did not come secretly. That was the worst of it. They came with a warrant, and the warrant was read at the gate by torchlight in the hearing of the whole house, and it said that the bishop's official, upon the plea, commanded the production of the book called the register of Nethmarsh, and that the same should be delivered to the lord of Wetherlaw's steward, to be carried to Marlhaugh and laid whole before the official at Candlemas. It said nothing about who had scraped it. It said nothing about the woman. It was, as far as Aldith could see by the torchlight, a perfectly lawful paper, correctly sealed, and it named the register as the thing to be delivered, and the steward as the man to deliver it. Wymarc came out to the gate with her mantle over her nightgown and read the warrant by the torch and then said, in the voice she used for the bishop's men, that the house would obey the bishop in all things, and that the register would be delivered, and that it would be delivered by the house's own hand at Marlhaugh, and not by the lord's steward, because the lord was a party to the plea and the man who carried a party's evidence to a court was a fool or a thief. The steward smiled and said that the warrant was plain and the bishop's command was plain, and that he would take the book now. Aldith, standing behind the prioress in the dark with the register under her cloak, and the new copy under her other arm, and the pricking sewn into her sleeve, knew that the night had been decided the moment the warrant was read. If she refused to give the register, she refused a bishop's command, and that was a worse crime than any scrape, because a court would forgive a woman almost anything except contempt. If she gave it, she put the whole of her evidence into the hands of the man who had taken the charter out of the chest, and it would reach Marlhaugh altered, or burned, or not at all. She stepped forward and said, in the clearest voice she had, that she was the woman who had the book in custody and would answer for it, and that she would deliver it to the bishop's hand alone, as the warrant commanded, and that she would begin the journey to Marlhaugh in the morning with the book, and that the lord's steward was welcome to ride beside her the whole way and never once put his own hand upon it. The steward's smile thinned. The men at his back shifted in the dark. "You will give it up on the road," he said. "I will give it up to the bishop's clerk at the bishop's door," said Aldith, "with a man of the lord's standing by to watch that it is whole. That is the warrant. It does not say you are to carry it. It says it is to be delivered." There was a long silence. In the silence Godith came out of the sacristy with the household keys jingling at her belt, and set herself in the gateway beside the prioress, and did not speak, and did not move, and looked at the steward out of her pale old eyes until he looked away. He could have taken it. He had twelve men and they had none. That was the thing Aldith thought about afterward, in the days when she had time to think. He had twelve men and could have taken it, and did not, and she came at last to believe that he did not take it because a seized book was a doubtful book, and a book delivered whole into the bishop's own hand was a book the lord's side could be seen to have trusted, and the lord's side wanted above all things to be seen to trust it. A forger's greatest need is to be believed, and the way he buys belief is by trusting the thing he has already ruined. When they were gone the house did something it never did, which was to sit up. The sisters came down into the hall in their nightclothes and stood about the cold hearth in a crowd, and nobody knew what to say, and Godith moved among them with the keys at her belt and made the younger ones sit and gave the older ones a little of the ale that was kept for the sick. Aldith took Tibba up to the scriptorium and barred the door and lit the lamp, and they worked there in the dead of the night because there was nothing else to do with the fear. She had Tibba read the collation back to her, word by word, from the top, slowly, and every time the girl's voice stumbled over a word Aldith made her begin the line again, until the whole of the argument had been spoken aloud in the little room twice over and Tibba could say it without looking at the page. Then she set the girl to pricking a spare copy of the seal-drawing on the last of the thin parchment, and she watched her, and corrected her, and made her do it three times, and did not tell her that the reason for it was not the court but the night. At the end of it Tibba said, with her eyes on the parchment, the thing that was on both their minds. "What if they come back before morning and take the register and the copy both, and do not ask, and do not wait for a warrant?" "Then I will have made four copies and hidden three," said Aldith, "and one of the three is with Warin and one is in the sacristy and one is sewn into a psalter, and the man who wants them all will have to burn the whole house to find them. A house of nuns will burn, if a lord is angry enough, and then there will be nothing to prove anything, and the fen will be his. I know that. That is the size of the thing. We are not playing for the fen anymore. We are playing that somebody in the next generation finds a book with a pricked name in it and asks what it means." Tibba pricked the last letter of the false name and set down the awl. "Then I am glad I learned it," she said. They did not sleep. In the morning the register was where Aldith had hidden it and the men of Wetherlaw had not come back, and she did not know whether that was because the warrant was lawful or because the lord had decided he did not need to steal a thing he meant to be given. She never found out. Some questions in that winter had no answer, and a scribe learns to leave a ruled space blank rather than fill it with a guess. In the morning Aldith rose before Lauds and found the register where she had hidden it, wrapped in cloth in the chest under the altar with the sacristy's spare linen, and she wrapped it twice more and put it into a satchel, and she put the new copy in the same satchel, and the pricking in her sleeve, and the tracing next to the pricking, and she went out to the gate to find Warin already there with the horses, and Father Reynold already there with his breviary, and Tibba already there with her own small satchel, because Tibba had decided, at some hour of the night, that the two who could work the pricking would travel together or not at all. They rode out at first light, south to Rushbourne and then north up the fen edge toward Marlhaugh, five of them on the road in the raw January cold, the register in the satchel across Aldith's shoulder, and behind them, at a distance that never quite closed and never quite opened, six men of Wetherlaw riding the same road and watching. "Six of them," said Tibba, looking back. "Five of us," said Aldith. "Six and a lord," said Tibba. "Five and a book." "The book has a great many letters in it," said Aldith. "Let us hope the court can read them faster than the lord can lose them." ---