第6章 The Enrolled Copy

The bishop's register was kept at Marlhaugh, in a stone room off the cathedral cloister that the canons called the treasury and everyone else called the muniment, and the road there ran fifteen miles north through the fen edge and the alder carr, and Aldith was not to travel it alone, and both she and the prioress knew it. She had traveled it once before, with her father, when she was fourteen, to be shown off to a canon as a prodigy of the pen, and she remembered the muniment room as a long dim chamber with a higher window than the scriptorium's and shelves of chests and rolls bound with tags, and a canon who had not looked at her once except to say that it was a pity she was a girl. The room had a smell she remembered still: wax and dust and the dry cleanliness of old parchment, the smell of a place where nothing had burned and nothing would. She wrote to the registrar for leave to come, in the prioress's name and in her own, and set out at the beginning of Advent with Tibba and with Warin, her brother-in-law, who had business at the midsummer fair at Rushbourne and was willing to have a woman and a girl in his company because they were kin and because he was a patient man who knew that a writer in the family was a thing worth keeping. The road was three days of hard going, cold and clear, and they slept the first night at a grange and the second at an inn where the ale was sour, and on the third morning they came up the last hill and saw the towers of Marlhaugh, grey as the sky, and the town below them scattered like sheep about a fold. The registrar was a canon named Vitold. He was not old and he was not young, a spare, upright man with the face of one who has weighed a great many small things and found most of them wanting, and he received them in the muniment room itself, standing, with his hands behind his back, as if receiving a woman in the bishop's treasury were a thing he did several times a week and did not enjoy. Warin did the talking, which was the arrangement they had made on the road, because Warin was a man and a merchant and had a right to be heard, and Aldith stood a step behind him with the writing on her arm and said nothing unless she was asked. "A copy of a charter," Vitold said. "A copy of a copy, in other words. The house's own register is a copy. You bring me a copy of a copy." "The house's register is scraped," Warin said. "We ask for the enrolment because the register cannot be trusted." "And the enrolment can." "The enrolment was made by your own registrar, three years ago, from the charter itself, when the charter was whole." Warin said it as if he had learned it by heart, which he had, from Aldith, on the road. "If the enrolment says one thing and the register says another, then the register was scraped, and no one has to trust a woman's word for it. The two books will disagree in front of your eyes, and your eyes will see it." Vitold looked at Warin for a long moment, and then, for the first time, he looked past him, at Aldith. "Who read the scraped leaf?" he asked. "Who decided that two books disagree?" Warin did not answer at once, because the honest answer was Aldith, and they had agreed that her name was not to be said unless it had to be. "I did not ask who wrote the letter," Vitold said. "I asked who read the leaf. A merchant reads hides. A merchant does not read a palimpsest, nor rule a line, nor tell one copyist's cross from another's. Somebody in this house reads hands, and it is not you, and it is not the prioress, and it is not the child." He looked at Aldith and waited, and his face gave nothing away. "I read it," Aldith said. "How?" "With the light and with my fingers and with a little lampblack, in the order I was taught." She kept her voice level. She would not be drawn into pleading. "Shall I show you, Father? You have better light here than I have at home, and a leaf of your own to hand, and I can show you on your own parchment how a scraped place takes the light, and then you may go home and try it on mine and decide for yourself whether I have lied." Vitold looked at her a while longer. Then he went to the shelf and took down a roll and laid it on the great table and stood back. "Show me," he said. She showed him. She took the roll and tilted it to the high window and found a place where the parchment had been mended long ago, an honest mend, the kind a copyist makes when a leaf tears, and she showed him how the mended place caught the light and how the surrounding skin did not, and she took her horn of lampblack and laid the thinnest wash and showed him how the dust sank into the old dark grain and refused the scraped place, and she did it slowly, twice, because once was never enough. And when she had done, Vitold took the roll and did it himself, with his own hands, on his own parchment, and found the mend, and said nothing for a while. "Sit," he said at last, and motioned to a stool, which was more than the canon of her childhood had ever done. "There is an enrolment," he said. "I remember the visitation three years past. We entered the charters of eleven houses. But the enrolments of that visitation are not in this room. They went to Cresswell, to the abbey, when the bishop was at Cresswell in the spring, and they have not come back, because the bishop's affairs at Cresswell have not finished. If you want the enrolment, you must go to Cresswell, and you must ask the abbot's man, and the abbot's man will ask the bishop's man, and the bishop's man is not here, he is at Cresswell, which is where you would be going." He permitted himself the smallest, driest of smiles. "It is the way of all archives. The thing you want is always one room further in." "Will you write us a letter to the abbot's man?" Warin asked. Vitold looked at Aldith, at her hands, still black at the fingertips from the lampblack, and then at the roll, which he had mended and unmended with his own hands twice over and found only the truth in. "I will write you a letter," he said, "because I have just seen a thing done properly, and I am not so far gone in the world that I cannot reward a proper hand. But I will tell you plainly, mistress, so that you do not mistake me: a letter from me will get you to Cresswell. It will not get you a woman into the abbot's muniment. For that you will need something I cannot give you. For that you will need a man who wants to open the door." He took up his pen and wrote the letter, and while he wrote, Aldith stood with her hands folded and her heart going hard, because he had said *mistress* and not *woman*, and she did not know whether it was mockery or courtesy, and she had learned long ago not to spend her hope on the difference. ---