第10章 The Mark on Sibby

Sibby Braccan came to the house at the end of the second week with a bag of the soft reed-fluff the village used for stuffing pillows, and said she had come to help, and stayed to talk, and in the talking took off her boot to show Eudora her own foot. "There," she said. "On the instep. Look at it in the light." On the instep of Sibby's left foot there was a mark, faint and brown, irregular, about the size of a thumbprint, and its shape was a leaf or a shallow cup. It was the twin of the mark Eudora had found on the innkeeper's granddaughter and on the smith's early boy, and Eudora had by now seen four such marks in one village in a single month, and had stopped being able to pretend that four was nothing. "I was born with that," Sibby said, and pulled her boot back on. "I was the second of my mother's three, and I was marked, and the village said I was owed, and the Reading was set for the spring and my name was in the book. And then the mark went." "Went?" "By the time the spring tide came, it was gone. My mother swears it. One morning it was on my foot and one morning it was not. Mrs. Rennock looked at it herself and said the Bride had changed her mind and I was to be Kept after all." Sibby's face did the thing it did when she meant to laugh and could not find the laugh. "So I am a child of the village twice over. First I was owed. Then I was not. Nobody in Grithfen will talk to me about it because nobody wants to say the word out loud twice." "And your son." "My son." Sibby was quiet. "My son was born in the winter, and he had the mark, and he was small, and he did not last the month. I have been told, by women who meant it kindly, that he was not titled, that he was only a sick child, that it was the cold that took him. I have also been told, by other women, that because the Bride did not take me she came back for what I had, and took my boy instead." She looked at Eudora with her flat steady eyes. "I want you to tell me which of them is lying." Eudora did not answer at once. She knew the medical answer, which was that a small winter child with a mark on his foot had died of a winter illness in a cold house in a wet country, and that this was the whole explanation and there were a hundred like him in any city in any January. She also knew what she had seen in the chapel, and the small cross beside Loveday's name, and the thin black book where sixteen children had been read into the air of a cold room with eight of them marked with a word that everybody understood and nobody said. "There is a rule in the book," Eudora said at last, because Sibby had asked her for the truth and had earned it, and because Eudora had begun to suspect that the rules were the whole of the disease and that the village would never be cured of it while nobody said them out loud. "A woman who was owed and was not titled, and then bears a marked child. In the ledger, that child is written down in the left column with the year, and in the third column the word is Tithed the following year and the child is not in the Roster again. Loveday did it three times. The names are there." Sibby took a long breath, and let it out slowly, and put both hands on the great heavy shape of the child inside her, and sat very still for a while with her eyes closed. When she opened them she did not look like a woman who had been given news. She looked like a woman who had finally been told the hour of a thing she had been waiting for since the day it was promised. "So it is true," she said. "They will come for this one." "I did not say that." "You do not have to. You have read the book, and you have counted, and you have seen the mark on the smith's boy on the ebb. The village will not let a marked child of a marked mother live, because a village that lets one rule go knows it will have to let them all go, and then the water comes over the whole hummock and the chapel stands three feet deep and nobody remembers why." She stood up and put on her shawl. "You are a clever woman, Eudora Cawdle, but you have not understood the first thing about Grithfen. They do not keep the Roster because they are cruel. They keep it because they are afraid. And there is no rule I could break, and no lie I could tell, that would frighten them more than the water." At the door she stopped. "You will be at the birth," she said. "I will be at the birth." "Then I will ask you for one thing, and I will ask it now while we are both still ourselves. When he is born, whatever is on him, do not let any woman of this parish touch him before you have held him. Not one. Not for a moment. You hold him first." Eudora said she would, and Sibby went out into the grey afternoon, and Eudora stood in the doorway a long time after she had gone, thinking about a promise she had just made and about the particular terrible quiet in a woman's voice when she has stopped asking for help and started making arrangements. Eudora did not sleep that night. She lay in the dark with the child breathing in its cradle and went over the promise she had made, and the more she went over it the less she liked the shape of it. She had promised to hold the child before any woman of the parish touched it. She had promised it to a woman who was counting the days from the wrong end, as if a birth were a thing that happened to the midwife and the mother and not a thing that arrived on its own terms, and she knew, with twenty years of births behind her, that a baby comes when it comes, and that a woman can no more schedule a labour than she can schedule weather, and a promise a mother asks for in that particular hour of her grief is a promise to do a thing that may well be impossible. Twice in the night she heard the Skein knock against the stones and got up to look, and twice there was nothing at the door but the dark. The second time she took the ledger off the shelf and opened it in the light of the banked fire and read the third column again by the low red glow, and did what she had been resisting for a week: she counted the children born in Grithfen since the last Reading, and the children written Kept, and the children written into the third column, and the number of the living in the parish. It did not balance. It had never once balanced. The parish was not a place where the books came out even, and people lived here anyway, and built their thresholds high and laid salt on their sills and buried their children and went on. At first light she put the ledger back and went out to the well, and the counting game was going again on the green, and the child who was counted last ran off laughing, and Eudora stood and watched the children and thought: if the rule is real, it is the only rule that has ever been drawn around a village in its own blood, and if it is not real, then this parish has murdered its children for two hundred years on the strength of a story, and she did not know which of those two truths would be worse to carry home. ---