第8章 The Seal in the Margin

The wind went round to the north on the fourth day of the new year, and by Twelfth Night the Amel had frozen at the edges and the fen stood white and the mill wheel was still. The priory kept its fires low and its lamps few, and the sisters went from the church to the refectory wrapped in whatever they owned, and Wymarc was ill with a winter cough and took to her bed and kept the register under her pillow, as if the book needed warming more than she did. Aldith worked. Work was the only answer she had to a cold that would not be argued with. She had taken the old register to her own house by the gate, where she could keep the fire up, and she sat with it open on the table and went through it again, leaf by leaf, looking for any other scrape she had missed, and found none, and at last let her eyes wander to the margins, where the old copyist had left small notes to herself: a hand pointing, a date, and here and there, beside a great charter, a little drawing. That was where she found the seal. Beside the foundation charter, in the outer margin, the old copyist had drawn the founder's seal. It was a round impression, drawn in outline with a fine pen and touched with a little yellow, and round the inner edge of the round there ran a line of tiny letters, the legend of the seal, drawn small and careful the way a copyist will copy whatever is set before her. Beneath the drawing the nun had written *the seal of the founder, of the founder's own hand*, and Aldith had seen the drawing a dozen times and passed over it, because a copyist's drawing of a seal is a copy of a copy and worth nothing in a court. Now she read the legend letter by letter, and her breath slowed. The founder's name, on the seal, was Fulbert. The legend round the seal read *SIGILLVM FULBERTI DE WEDERLAWE*. But the nun had drawn it, in her small careful hand, as *SIGILLVM FULBETRI DE WEDERLAWE*. Two letters of the name were turned about. *FULBETRI* where it should have been *FULBERTI*. It was the kind of slip a copyist makes once in a thousand words and never sees, because the eye reads what it expects and the hand writes what the eye has just left. She had made such slips herself. Her father had made them and had taught her to hunt them down. Nobody but the woman who drew the margin, and the man who read the margin, and God, would ever know that the founder's name was written wrong in that one small place in that one book of Nethmarsh. Unless a man had cut a seal in the shape of the drawing, and never looked at a true impression of the founder's seal at all, and thereby set the copyist's slip in wax. She sat back and looked at the margin and the small wrong name, and she felt the whole case turn under her, slowly, like a boat coming about on a still water. The register was scraped and she could not prove who scraped it. The seal in the margin was wrong and no one would care. But a forged seal made from this drawing would carry the wrong name in its legend, and the wrong name would be Fulbert spelled Fulbetri in wax on the lord's deed, and that was a thing that could be looked at and read and counted, and it would not be her word against a man's. It would be the wax against the book. She needed to see the lord's deed's seal. She turned the problem over the way she turned a pen, this way and that, looking for the nib. She had seen the seal once, at the manor court, across a hall in poor light, and had marked only that it was new. Godith had held it to a candle and marked only that it was new. Two women, two marks, and neither of them worth a jot in a court, because a woman's mark on a seal was worth exactly what the next man said it was worth. That was the thing she had to break. She did not need to see the seal again. She needed one other person to see it who would be believed, and she needed that person to look at the letters and not at the wax, which was the one thing no man at Wetherlaw would think to do, because to them a seal was a seal and a name was a decoration. She could not go to Wetherlaw and ask. She went instead to Godith, in the sacristy, and found the old nun winding the year's candles and setting them in the holders, and she sat down and said what she wanted, because Godith was the oldest and the least afraid and had been hinting at the chest for a month. "The lord's deed," Godith said. "I have held it." "You have held it?" "Theodric the clerk brought it here before Michaelmas, to show the prioress that the lord would prove his words. He laid it on the parlour table and I held the wax up to the candle to see whether the seal was whole, because I keep the house's marks and I know the founder's." She set down a candle. "I said to him then that the seal was new. He said the wax was new because the deed was lately copied from the old for the court, and I said that a copy sealed with white wax was no copy at all. He took it up and went away." "And the letters on the seal?" Godith looked at her a long moment. "You are asking me to have read them," she said. "I cannot read. I never could. But I can look, and I looked, because you do not spend sixty years standing next to a seal press without learning to look at a seal. And I saw the name on it, and I remember it was long and crowded, and one of the letters had a bad place in it, as if the cutter had cut it twice." "Which letter?" "I cannot read, Aldith. I can only say that I saw a bad place." Godith's pale eyes went to the window and the frozen fen. "And I will tell you one more thing, and then I will not speak of it again. On the day the chest was open, in the winter, the day you were away at the lying-in, I came up the stair to the hall because the door stood open and the fire was smoking. Theodric was alone in the room. He had his hand in the chest, and the binder's knife was on the bench beside him, and when he saw me he put his hand away and smiled and said the prioress knew what he did, and shut the chest, and I shut the door, and I have said it to no one until now. If you ask me before God whether he took a charter out, I do not know. If you ask me whether I saw him with his hand in the chest and a knife at his elbow, I saw it, and I will say so, and no court in this country will take my word over a clerk's, which is why I have kept it this long." "Then I will make the wax speak instead," said Aldith. "It is the only witness left that is not a woman." ---