第20章 Candlemas

She waited a whole afternoon before she opened it, because a letter from the bishop's official was a thing you sat with, the way you sat with a witness whose word you did not yet know, and because she wanted to open it in the flat north light of her own scriptorium, at her own bench, with her tools around her. She opened it with the penknife, along the fold, the way her father had taught her, so that the seal stayed whole and the paper stayed clean, because a letter that may become evidence should be opened as you would open a deed. It was in Vitold's hand, and it was short. *To Aldith, scribe of Nethmarsh. The bishop is returned from Rome and has seen the roll of the plea of Wetherlaw, and has asked me a question that I cannot answer without you. In the register of the see of Marlhaugh, among the enrolments of the visitation two years past, there is a charter of the hospital of Rushbourne, and the bishop's registrar swears it is in his own hand and was enrolled from a charter that the hospital's master brought to the manor, and I have looked at it and I do not believe it. The hand is his, and the words are his, and the seal is the hospital's, and yet there is something in the skin of it that I cannot name, and I have learned in the course of one winter to mistrust a skin I cannot name. It is not the same as your scraped leaf. It is quieter. It has no lane in it. It may be nothing, and the bishop will thank me for wasting his time, and I will have wasted it gladly if it is nothing.* *But if it is not nothing, then it was not done by a clerk of Wetherlaw, and it was not done for a fen, and there is no lord in it for me to weigh against a book. If it is not nothing, then there is a hand at work in the bishop's own register, and the only hand in this country that I have seen find such a thing is a woman's hand that no court will let speak.* *Come when you can. Bring the girl who can do the pricking. Come quietly, and come as my scribe and not as yourself, for if there is a forger in the bishop's chancery, then the last person he will fear is a woman, and the last thing he will watch for is a woman with a pen.* *Vitold.* Aldith read it twice and set it down on the bench and sat with her hands flat on the table, the way she sat after sealing a deed, as if the letter needed settling like new mortar. Outside, the fen lay green to the water's edge and the mill turned, and somewhere beyond the fen a lord who had lost a fen was waiting for another winter, and somewhere in the bishop's own house, in the bishop's own book, in the bishop's own registrar's hand, there was a leaf that was quiet, and had no lane in it, and had been made to lie. She thought about Godith, who had said there was no room in a roll for the name of a woman who reads hands, and about the turned name in the wax, and about the true name of the founder, Fulbert spelled Fulbert, and about the fact that the bishop's own chancery would not let a woman in the door and would not, for that very reason, ever see her coming. Before she packed, she went to the prioress. Wymarc was in the parlour with the accounts, and she read the letter twice, and set it down, and did not ask the one question Aldith had come expecting her to ask, which was whether the house would lend her. She asked another, harder one. "Whose book is it?" she said. "The bishop's own register. If you go to Marlhaugh and find a false hand in the bishop's own book, then you will not be accusing a lord's clerk, whom nobody loves. You will be accusing a man the bishop trusts with his seals, and the bishop will have to choose between his official and his registrar, and a house of nuns a mile from Rushbourne will be a very small thing in that choice." She looked up. "I am not telling you not to go. I am telling you what it will cost the house, so that you do not go thinking it costs nothing but you." "It may cost the house," said Aldith. "It may cost me more." "Then go as his scribe and not as ours," said the prioress. "If you are found, you are a woman who copies hands for hire and can be dismissed by any clerk who tires of her. If you are ours, you are a house's claim in a bishop's quarrel, and a house can be made to answer for a claim. Vitold wrote as much in his letter and he was right. Go in by the servants' door and come out by it, and if the matter is nothing, say the matter is nothing, and let the bishop's man keep his office, and let the house keep its fen, and let the quiet thing stay quiet." "Even if the quiet thing is a lie?" "Especially then," said Wymarc. "A lie in a bishop's book is not a house's quarrel. There are a hundred clerks in this see and every one of them writes what he is paid to write, and a woman who makes it her business to correct them will not last one winter, let alone eleven. I am telling you this because I am older than you, and I have watched better scribes than you hang themselves on a truth that was never theirs to tell." Aldith stood with the letter in her hand and understood that the prioress had just given her the only kind of blessing she had to give, which was a warning, and that she would have to decide, alone, whether a warning was a thing to obey or a thing to walk past. "I will go," she said. "And I will be careful. And if there is a man in the bishop's chancery writing lies with the bishop's seal, then sooner or later some other woman's hand will find his, and I would rather it were mine, because mine knows what it is looking at." Wymarc said nothing more. She turned the letter over and read it a third time, and then folded it and gave it back, and that was the whole of her leave-taking. She opened her own chest and took out the tracing and the pricking and rolled them in a cloth, and set them by the door. Then she went to find Tibba, to tell her they were going to Marlhaugh, and to tell her what to pack. "There will be a row," said Tibba, who had grown a little wise and a little wicked in the winter. "There is always a row, with you." "There will be a quiet thing," said Aldith. "That is worse. A quiet thing in a bishop's book, with no lane in it and no wax to catch, and a hand that knows it is being hunted because it has hunted. We will go in by the servants' door and out by the servants' door, and no man will look at us twice, and if I am right, we will spend the summer proving that the quietest forgery in the see of Marlhaugh was made by the one hand in the whole country that no court will ever let stand up and say so." "And if you are wrong?" "Then we will have wasted the bishop's time," said Aldith, "and we will come home, and the fen will still be ours, and the mill will still turn, and I will finish the psalter before the harvest." She looked out at the green fen and the turning mill, and at the road going north, and she was, she found, almost happy, which was a thing she had not been in a long year. "But I am not wrong. I have been reading hands for twenty years, and I have never yet read one that did not tell me the truth about the person who wrote it. That is what the winter taught me. They can take the hand. They cannot take what the hand has already said." She put the letter in her sleeve, beside the pricking, and went to pack.