第13章 The Road to Cresswell

They rode all the first day and into the dark, and slept at a grange of the abbey's that stood where the fen road crossed the old Roman bank, a long low house of stone with a fire in the middle of the floor and smoke going out through the thatch, and the six men of Wetherlaw slept in the barn and the five of them slept in the hall, and nobody said a word to anybody that could not be overheard. Aldith slept with the satchel under her head and her knife in her hand, the way she had slept on the road with her father when she was a girl. Tibba slept beside her with her back to the wall. Warin took the first watch and Reynold the second, though Reynold's watch consisted mostly of telling his beads and starting at every sound in the straw. The sound came in the dead hour before Matins. She was not asleep when it came: the scrape of the latch, slow, and then the long slow lift of the door, and then a shape against the red of the dying fire, and the shape was coming not toward her head, where the satchel was, but toward her feet, where the satchel was not. She had hung the satchel on a peg by the door the way a woman hangs a bag she does not expect to need, and she had put the register itself, wrapped in a horse-blanket, in the feed-sack under Warin's saddle, and she had done it in the open where the stable-boy saw her do it, so that if anyone watched, they would watch the wrong thing. The shape stooped over the peg and lifted the satchel and turned, and found Aldith standing behind it with the knife in her hand, and Tibba waking beside her, and Warin stirring at the door. The man dropped the satchel and ran, and they let him run, because a caught man of the lord's would have made a quarrel nobody could win, and an escaped one had told them everything they needed to know. "He went to the satchel," said Tibba, after, when the door was barred and the fire built up. "He went to the satchel," said Aldith, "which held the copy. If he had got it, he would have carried it to the steward and the steward would have found a plain fair copy of the register, and he would have said to the court that the priory's book was whole and true, and the court would have looked at the fair copy and believed him, and the true book, the scraped one, would have been the one nobody asked for." "You set a trap on purpose." "I hung a bag where a thief would look, because I know how a thief thinks. A thief thinks a woman carries the thing she is afraid of. So I carried the thing I was not afraid of, and I put the thing I was afraid of where the horses were, and I slept on it." They rode out before dawn. The six men of Wetherlaw were gone from the barn, and that was the second thing that told Aldith what she was carrying. They came to an inn at the ford at dusk on the second day, and there the last of Wetherlaw's offers found her, and it found her not with a threat but with a bargain, which was the thing she feared more, because she had been poor all her life and knew exactly what a bargain could do to a poor woman in the dark. Theodric came to the inn himself. He came without his men, which was a piece of theatre Aldith understood and did not believe, and he sat down across the fire from her and turned his cap in his hands and spoke quietly, the way one clerk speaks to another, as if between the two of them there were no court and no lord and no fen, only two people who knew what a pen could do. "You are going to lose," he said. "Not because you are wrong. Because you are a woman with a scraped book and no name. I know how it will go. You will show them the scrape and they will say you made it. You will show them the ink and they will say you wrote it. You will show them the seal in the margin and they will say any fool can draw a seal." "And you will say the book was whole when you inventoried it," said Aldith. "I will say the book was whole when I inventoried it," he agreed, "because it was. I am not required to say what I did to it afterward, and no man has asked, and no court will ask, because the asking is the whole of the thing and they will not put the question in the right way." He leaned forward. "But there is another way. Say that the prioress bade you do it. Say the house was going to lose the fen and the prioress told you to make the words of the old grant stand, and you did it out of obedience to a woman you serve. A court will believe that. A court likes nothing better than a woman who obeyed another woman and is sorry. Say it, and I will speak for you, and there will be a purse, and you will leave this country with your hand and your trade, and in ten years you will be a scrivener in some town that has never heard of the fen, and this will be a bad dream." Aldith sat and looked at the fire and let him finish, because she wanted to hear the whole of the offer, and because a thing heard to the end is a thing you can answer. "Which woman," she said at last, "will you name when the prioress is asked to answer it, and stands where I am standing? Because that is what you are buying. If I name the prioress, you have your guilty woman, and the book, and the fen, and the purse, and I have my life. It is a fair price. I have never once been offered a fair price." She looked at him. "I will not take it. And I will tell you why, since we are speaking as two people who know what a pen can do. A scribe has exactly one thing that cannot be taken, and it is not the hand, because they can take that, and it is not the name, because a woman has no name to lose. It is the thing she has already written. I have written down what is on that leaf, and every word of it is true, and I have made copies, and every copy is where a court can find it, and if I give you a lie now, then every true word I ever wrote is worth nothing, and I would rather lose the hand. So no. Ride back to your lord and tell him the woman said no, and tell him the woman made four copies, because he will hear it from me soon enough and it may as well spoil his supper." Theodric looked at her for a while without speaking. He put on his cap. At the door he paused, and said, almost unwillingly, the only honest thing he said in the whole of that winter. "You are better at this than I am," he said. "That is why I am afraid of you." He went out, and in the morning they rode the last five miles to Cresswell, and the six of Wetherlaw rode in sight the whole way, and did nothing. ---