第14章 The Box Is Opened

Cresswell received them in the thin grey light of the morning, and the porter, who had seen them before, took them straight to the guest-hall and sent for the precentor. Ilbert came with ink on his fingers, as he always had, and with something new in his face, a careful, guarded excitement that Aldith recognized at once because she had worn it herself, on the day she found the shave. "The commissioner has come back," he said. "Vitold. He came two days ago and has taken a chamber in the abbot's range, which he did not do before, and he has asked to see the bishop's box at the beginning of Candlemas week, which is tomorrow, and he has asked the abbot's leave to hold a session of the officiality in the chapter house on Candlemas Day itself, and the leave is granted." "Then the court is here, and not at Marlhaugh." "The court is here," said Ilbert, "because the book is here, and because the commissioner will not have it said that he carried a lord's quarrel home to his own town to judge it. He means to finish it here and be gone." He glanced at the satchel on her shoulder. "Is that the book?" "That is the book." "Then come. He would see you before the court, alone, if a woman can be said to be alone in a house of two hundred men." Vitold received her in the guest-parlour, standing, as he had stood in the muniment at Marlhaugh, with his hands behind his back and his eyes going over her as a man goes over a page he has read before and means to read again more carefully. "I have read your bill," he said. "The prioress sent it, as the plea required, and it came to me at Marlhaugh before the summons did. It is a good bill. It is better than the pleadings of the master who wrote the lord's answer, and he was trained in the schools." He held out his hand. "The book." She gave it to him, and he laid it on the table and opened it at the foundation and did not look at the words. He looked at the leaf itself, with his thumbs and his eyes and the cold light from the window, and he found the shave, and he found the hollows, exactly as she had, though more slowly, and he said nothing while he looked, and Aldith stood still and let him. Then he closed the book and put his hand flat upon it. "Sit down," he said. "I am going to tell you what I think, and you are going to listen, and you are not going to thank me, because I have not done anything for you yet. In two days the lord's steward will bring me a deed sealed with the founder's seal, and he will say that deed shows the fen was leased and not given, and Achard of Rushbourne will say that the alms words in this book are the fresher and were written by a hand that meant to steal a fen, and Theodric will say the book was whole when he drew up the inventory, and by the end of it there will be a book, and a deed, and three men of credit, and one woman, and I know exactly which of the five the court will believe." "Then why have you opened the book at all?" Aldith asked. "You could have taken the three men and the deed and never sent for the woman." "Because I am the bishop's official," said Vitold, "and the bishop's official does not rule for a lord in a matter of the bishop's tithes without being able to give the bishop a reason that will not burn him at Rome, and because I saw you show a mend on my own parchment with your own hands, and I have been thinking about it ever since." He took his hand off the book. "Now. The abbot's precentor tells me he has a charter of your founder, sealed with the founder's own seal, and that he has looked at the legend and found something in it. I have sent for it. We will open the bishop's box together, and we will read the enrolment, and we will read the seal, and then each of you may go away and prepare, and on Candlemas Day the court will hear the whole matter and I will give judgement." He looked at her. "You will not speak at the court. Nobody will let you, and if you try, the lord's man will have you removed for a woman who makes trouble, and he will be within his right. Whatever you have to say through your book, your book must say it, and whatever you have to say through your hands, you must say it in front of witnesses while I am watching, not as a speech but as a demonstration, a thing done. Do you understand me?" "I understand you, Father." "Good," said Vitold. "Then we will have an argument about a leaf, and not about a woman, and the leaf will win or lose, and I will not have to hang either of us." They opened the box the next morning, in the presence of the abbot's sacrist and two canons and Ilbert and Warin and Reynold and Aldith, who was permitted to stand at the back of the room because the commissioner had said she might. The seal-thread was cut and the red seal broken whole, and the lid came up, and inside lay the enrolments of the visitation of three years past, in bundles, tied with tags, in the neat cramped hand of the registrar who is always behind and always catching up. Ilbert found the bundle for Nethmarsh and untied it and spread the sheets on the table, and the sheet for the foundation charter was there, enrolled in the registrar's own hand, with the date of the visitation written at the foot and the bishop's small seal beside it. It read, in the registrar's hand, copying what had been set before him three years ago when the charter was whole: *in free, pure and perpetual alms*, and the bounds whole, *from the two willows and the old ditch as the water runneth to the mill*, the mill named, the mill included, the fen and the mill given to God and to the nuns of Nethmarsh forever. Vitold read it once aloud, slowly, in the cold room, and nobody said anything, and then he read the same clause out of the scraped register, and the two readings lay on the table side by side, one naming a lease of three lives and one naming a gift, and the room looked at the two of them and understood without being told what a difference a word can make to a house and the bread of a hundred winters. "The enrolment is true," said Vitold. "The register is altered. That is now known to this court and to these witnesses, and it will be entered. But it does not yet say who altered it, and it does not yet say whether the lord's deed is true or false, and a house is not saved by a piece of paper that shows it was robbed. A house is saved by showing who robbed it." He turned to Ilbert. "The founder's charter." Ilbert brought it, a single sheet under a cloth, and laid it on the table, and lifted the cloth, and the seal of the founder of Nethmarsh lay on the table in the flat grey light, a hundred years old, dull and dark at the edges from a hundred years of hands, and round its inner edge, in letters worn shallow but legible, ran the legend: *SIGILLVM FULBERTI DE WEDERLAWE*. Fulbert spelled Fulbert. Not one letter turned. Aldith reached into her sleeve and drew out the pricking, the thin parchment pricked full of the false name, and laid it beside the true seal, and Vitold bent over the two of them for a long time without speaking, and when he straightened his face was still, and something in it had hardened. "Where did you get this?" he said. "From the margin of the register of Nethmarsh," said Aldith. "Beside the foundation charter the old copyist drew the founder's seal, and she drew the name wrong, and the wrong name is here, pricked from her drawing, letter for letter. If the lord's deed carries this name on its seal, then the lord's seal was made from a copyist's mistake, and the mistake is in a book that never left the priory, and the man who made the seal made it from our book." Vitold held the pricking up to the window and let the light come through the little holes. "On Candlemas Day," he said, "I will require the lord's deed to be laid on this table, and I will read its seal in open court, and every man in the room shall see what is written on it with his own eyes." He gave the pricking back to her. "Keep it. Keep every copy of it you have made, and be in the chapter house an hour before the court, and bring all of it, and bring the girl who can do the pricking, because if they take your hand in the middle of the demonstration I want another pair of hands in the room." ---