第11章 Two at Once

The lighterman's wife was delivered of twins on the night before the Tithe tide, and Eudora fought the whole village for them both. The lighterman's wife lived at the far end of the village, in a house with one room and a leaking roof, and she had not been on Eudora's list because she had not told anyone she was carrying two, and when the labour came fast and hard in the small hours Eudora knew within the hour that there would be a second child after the first, and by then the room was full of women and the rule was in the room too. "Two," one of them whispered, and the whisper went round the room like fire in dry reeds. "Two at once. Only one is Kept." "Get out," Eudora said. Nobody moved. The woman on the bed had reached the place in a labour where she was past caring who was in the room or what they said, and Eudora worked with her and around her, and the first child came, a girl, blue-black haired and furious, and Eudora cleared her and wrapped her and gave her to the grandmother and told the room that the firstborn of any birth is the firstborn and that she would hear no talk of owed or Kept in this room while a woman was bleeding and pushing. And then, an hour later, the second came, a boy this time, smaller and slower, and Eudora held him and looked at him the way she had promised Sibby she would look at Sibby's child, and turned his feet and found the mark on neither of them. No mark. On either child. The whole room saw it. She held both feet up to the candle and turned them for the women along the wall to see, and there was no mark on either foot, no brown leaf, no shallow cup, nothing at all. A boy and a girl born of a marked mother's line on the night before the Tithe, and the Bride had not put her sign on them. The women did not believe it. That was the thing Eudora had not been ready for. She had expected relief or wonder or argument, and instead she saw a room of frightened people look at the two clean feet and decide, in the space of a breath, that the absence of the mark was itself a sign of the worst kind, the kind that meant the Bride was not choosing because the whole parish was already spoken for. "Write them both Kept," the grandmother said. "Write it and say nothing." "I will write what is true." "Write them both Kept." The old woman said it again, and her voice was not hard, it was tired, and it carried a whole village's worth of arithmetic. "If you write one of them owed they will take the other to balance it. That is how it works. It has always been how it works. Write them both Kept and let the Bride decide what she is owed when she comes." Eudora stood there with the second child in her arms, and she was aware that she had a thing to decide and no time to decide it, and that the deciding would happen in the ledger and not in the room, and that whatever she wrote she would have to write in front of these people and live among them afterward. The child in her arms was warm and small and clean of every mark. The book was on the table. The pen was in it. She turned and put on her coat and walked home through the empty street with the tide out and the reeds standing black against a sky going grey, and it was not until she was inside her own door with the bolt shot that she allowed herself to understand what she had done. She had written a second Kept into the book of a parish that counted, and in a village that believed in a column, two Kept meant one unpaid, and a debt unpaid is an invoice with no name on it, addressed to anyone. The lighterman came to the house the next day with a string of eels and stood in the doorway with his cap in his hand and thanked her three times, and each time he thanked her he looked at the cradle by the bed, and Eudora understood that he had been told the children had no mark and had decided to be glad of it and had not yet managed the trick. He was a thin man with the face of a man who had been poor a long time, and in his eyes there was the slow arithmetic of a father counting what he could and could not afford to lose. "They are both Kept," he said. "That is what was told me. Both of them." "Both of them." He nodded slowly and put the eels on the table and went out, and Eudora stood a long moment in the kitchen and thought about what it cost a man to be told a good thing by a woman he did not know and to decide, on the strength of it, to go home and love his children. Then she thought about the column, and the page, and what a book does when a parish believes that the book is the world. She had no way, that night, of knowing who would open it. She would find out before morning. She slept badly, and woke twice, and each time she woke she lay and listened to the Skein and did the sum again in the dark, and each time it came to the same thing, that a count is a promise and a promise is a debt and a village that keeps a book will always find someone to pay. She had come to Grithfen to lay her work down for a season and pick it up again with steady hands, and instead she had put her hands on the ledger, and the ledger had put its hand on her, and she was beginning to suspect that she had chosen the wrong trade for a woman who cannot leave a sum unbalanced. At the far end of the village, in the house with the leaking roof, the twins slept in one crib, and the lighterman slept on a chair by the fire with his boots on, and out beyond the houses the Skaithe lay flat and calm and waited, the way a field waits, the way a page waits for ink. And in her own room, on the table, the book lay closed with two Kept written in a fresh line, and beside the line there was nothing in the third column yet, and there would be nothing there until somebody in the parish decided whose name had paid for it. She got up once before dawn and stood at the window with the child asleep behind her and looked out at the flat shining water and did the thing she could not stop doing, which was to try to think of a way out that did not cost a person its whole self. There was not one. There never is, in a village that keeps a book. Whatever she wrote, someone paid, and the only choice she would ever be offered was which of the names on her own page should be the one that had paid for the others. ---