第5章 The Wax and the Cord

The old register lay open on Aldith's bench in the flat north light, and beside it lay the new one, and beside that lay the half-sheet on which she had written the reading of the hollows. She had begun that morning to build a case out of things, the way a mason builds a wall, one stone at a time, each stone a thing that could be seen by any eye and touched by any hand, and none of them her. The first stone was the shave. She could show that with the raking light and the wash of lampblack, and she could show it to a man, and he would see it, and the seeing would be the evidence, and not her. The second stone was the ink. She had made her own ink for twenty years and knew it the way a baker knows dough. The false clause had been written with an ink blacker than the rest of the leaf and sitting higher on the skin, and when she drew a wet brush across a corner of it the false ink loosened at once and ran, while the old ink beside it held. Fresh ink ran. Old ink held. She had known it as a girl, from her father, who had told her once that a forger could imitate a hand but could not imitate a hundred years. The third stone was the hand. She copied the false clause, word for word, into a corner of her half-sheet, studying it the way she had been taught to study an unknown hand, and she saw what the forger had done and what he had missed. He had copied the old copyist's letters well, or well enough. But the old copyist of the register had been a nun who wrote the whole book in one hand over many years, and her hand had a small habit that no stranger would think to imitate: at the foot of every charter she drew the little cross that the grantors had made, and she drew it always the same way, the two strokes of it meeting not in a point but in a broad open joining, as if the woman who drew it had been unwilling to close the thing. The false clause was written in an imitation of her letters. The little cross under the foundation, the grantor's mark that the old copyist had copied in her own open way, had not been touched at all, and stood closed and pointed and clean, the way a stranger's hand would draw it, a stranger who had never once copied the marks of other hands. She wrote all of this down, and the fourth stone besides, which was the bounds: that the words *and the mill* had been cut away, and that the cut had left a gap in the line that a copyist working from a whole text would never leave, because no one copies a hole. Four stones. And she needed a fifth, because Sir Fulk's deed had a seal, and a seal was a stone a court would understand better than ink, since a seal was wax, and wax was made by men and bought by men, and men could be found to say who bought it. She went down to the village and asked after Randel's boy, who carted for the chandler, and the boy remembered the summer because the clerk had paid him a penny to carry the pail up the hill and had told him to keep his mouth shut. She wrote that down too. Ninepence of wax and a pail of green copper, sold to the clerk Theodric at midsummer in the year now running, carted to Wetherlaw by Randel's boy, who would say so to any man who asked him, because a penny was a penny and a boy's word was worth more than a woman's. Still four stones and a boy. She needed the old thing, the true thing, the charter that had been taken from the chest. Without it she had a scraped leaf and a bought pail of green, and a court could say the scrape was the work of the woman who handled the book, and the green copper was the work of a man mending a book, and both were true and neither was proof. On the fourth evening she sat by her own fire, because she kept a small house by the priory gate the way a lay scribe kept a house, and she thought about the chest. The chest had been carried down to the hall in the winter for the rebinding. The work had taken three days. The binder had come from Rushbourne with his cord and his boards and his awl, and Theodric had come with him, as the lord's clerk, because the prioress had asked the lord for a man who could write, to make an inventory of the chest while it was open, so that the house would know what it had. That had been a kindness of the prioress. A man who could write, to count the charters of a house whose own best writer was a woman and a hireling. She had been away from the priory for those three days. She had been in Rushbourne at her sister-in-law's lying-in, and she had come back to find the chest shut and the inventory made, in Theodric's soft even hand, and the foundation charter not in it. She had not known the foundation charter was gone until Godith had hinted and the prioress had told her, and now she thought of it, and the thinking gave her a cold thing, which was this: that the man who made the inventory was the only man who could have known, on that day, exactly what the chest held, and exactly what would be missed, and exactly what a court would ask for first when the fen came up. She went to the prioress at Compline and stood in the dark church with the bell still ringing and said what she had thought. "I know," said Wymarc. "I have known it since the day you showed me the leaf. And I have said nothing, because to accuse the lord's clerk is to accuse the lord, and to accuse the lord is to stand in the manor court and set a woman's word against his, and we have already seen what that is worth." She looked at the altar, where the one candle burned. "But I have not been idle. I have written to the bishop's registrar. I have asked for the copy of the foundation that was enrolled at the last visitation, when the bishop came, three years ago, and his registrar entered the house's charters into the register of the see. If that enrolment is found, it will show the clause as it stood before the blade touched the leaf. And it will bear the registrar's own hand and the date and the bishop's seal, and no man can set a woman's word against it." "And if it is found?" "Then you will have your old thing," said the prioress. "And you will go and fetch it, if the bishop's men will let a woman into their muniment room. Which they will not. So we will have to find a way." ---