第17章 The Two Names

Sir Fulk's steward brought the deed to the table. He brought it in a leather wallet and drew it out with both hands and laid it flat, and it lay beside the register and the enrolment and the abbey's charter of the founder's own time, four writings in a row on one table, and the high grey light came down on all four of them together, and the whole court leaned in. It was a fair single sheet, and it was old, or it had been made old, and the hand on it was a good imitation of the hand of a hundred years before, and the green cord was new and bright around the seal, and the seal itself was the colour of cream, and it sat on the parchment round and clean and unmarked, as a seal sits on a deed that has never once been carried in a man's coat across a hundred winters. Vitold called the clerk of the court to him and set the deed between them and turned it so that the seal showed to the light, and then he did something Aldith had not asked for and had not dared to hope for, but which she would remember for the rest of her life as the moment the thing turned: he took a narrow strip of parchment from the table and held it beside the wax and said to the clerk, and then to the room, in a voice that carried to the far wall: "Read the legend." And the clerk of the court, in the flat voice of a clerk reading a roll, read out the legend round the inner edge of the seal of the lord's deed, letter by letter, as it was written there: *SIGILLVM FULBETRI DE WEDERLAWE*. Fulbert spelled with the r and the t turned about. A copyist's slip, sixty years old, cut into wax. A man behind Aldith said *what* in a low voice, and was hushed. Sir Fulk half rose and sat down again. Theodric did not move, and his face did not change, and it was in that stillness, more than in anything else that was said that day, that Aldith read the end of the thing. Vitold held the strip of parchment beside the true seal, the abbey's charter of the founder's own hand, worn and dark, and read again, slowly: *SIGILLVM FULBERTI DE WEDERLAWE*. Fulbert spelled Fulbert. Not a letter turned. "Court," said Vitold, "the deed before you is sealed with a seal whose legend is wrong, and the wrongness in it is not the wrongness of a worn matrix or a careless cutter. It is the wrongness of two letters turned about in a copyist's drawing, and I have here, pricked from the margin of the register of Nethmarsh, that copyist's drawing, made sixty years ago by a nun of that house, wrong in exactly the same place and in exactly the same way." He held up the pricking to the light, and the little holes carried the false name, and he laid it beside the wax, and the room saw the two wrongs together, the wrong in the pricking and the wrong in the wax, the same wrong, made once in a book and once in a seal, sixty years apart. "Who drew the deed?" said Vitold. Nobody answered. Sir Fulk looked at his master and his master looked at his hands. And then, in the silence, Master Achard of Rushbourne stood up. The town scrivener stood with his cap in his hands and his face ugly with a kind of shame that Aldith recognized, the shame of a man who has been used and has only now understood by how much. "I drew the deed," he said. "I drew it in the summer, from a draft and a seal that Theodric, the lord's clerk, gave me, and I was paid well for it, and I believed it was the copy of an old deed that the lord needed for his court, made young for the court and sealed afresh, which is a thing done often enough in this country and is not forgery but custom. I did not look at the seal close, and I should have. If I had looked at the seal close, I would have seen the turned letters, and I would have known that no honest matrix ever made them, and I would have asked where the matrix came from." He looked at the wax on the table. "The matrix came from a drawing in a book, and the book is a woman's book, and I am ashamed to have been the hand of it, and I will say what I did, to the bishop, to the archdeacon, to the king's justices, wherever this court is asked of me, and I will say it now before these men." "Was the woman, the writer of the register, a party to it?" said Vitold. "She was not. I never spoke to her about it, and no one spoke to me of her, and until the citation came I did not know she had found the shave. If I had known, I would not have drawn it, because I did not leave the bishop's chancery to draw other men's lies." Achard sat down. He had said the last of it with his eyes on the table and not on Aldith, but he had said it, and in a court that would not take her word, he had given her back the one thing she could not give herself, which was a man's word, spoken by a man who had every reason to hate her. Then Godith rose from her litter at the back of the room. She rose by inches, helped by a lay brother, and she was old and the journey had cost her, and she spoke in a voice that did not carry well, and the court leaned in to hear her, and the clerk wrote every word, because it was not every day that the oldest nun in a house stood up in the bishop's court and accused a lord's clerk with her own mouth. "I am Godith, sacrist of Nethmarsh," she said, "and I keep the marks of the house. In the winter, when the chest was open for the binding, I came into the hall and found the lord's clerk alone with his hand in the chest and the binder's knife on the bench at his elbow, and he smiled at me and told me the prioress knew what he did, and I shut the door and said nothing, because I cannot read and because my word is worth nothing against a clerk's. Now the court has heard what a clerk's word is worth in this matter. And I will tell the court one more thing, and then I will sit down, because I am tired, and I do not think I will come to another court. I held the lord's deed in my hand before Michaelmas, in the priory parlour, and I told the clerk then that its seal was new and its wax was white, and he took it up and went away, and I have thought of it every night since, that I said the true thing to the wrong man in the wrong room, and he was the one who carried it out of the door." She sat down. The lay brother lowered the litter. And Sir Fulk of Wetherlaw, who owned the ground of half a parish and the wool of a hundred folds and had never in his life been contradicted by anyone he considered a person, stood up in the bishop's chapter house and looked around the room, at his master, at his steward, at the four writings on the table, at the wax with the turned name, and he did not sit down. "Steward," he said. Theodric did not answer him. Theodric was looking at the door. ---