第15章 The Office

Drusilla Rennock came in the night, without knocking, and stood in Eudora's doorway with her boots wet and the light of a lantern on her face, and said the thing plainly, which was the most frightening thing she had done since Eudora met her. "You have read Loveday's pages," she said. "I have." "Then you know what the office is and what it costs and what happens to a woman who refuses it, and there is no need for either of us to pretend any longer." She came in and shut the door behind her and set the lantern on the table. "I have come to tell you the rest, which Loveday never knew and which you are owed, since you are the one who will have to do it." Eudora did not offer her a chair. "I am listening." "Once in a great while, the water does not take a child. It comes ashore to make one." Drusilla sat down anyway, on the stool by the fire, and folded her hands. "That is the entire nature of a Bride, in this village and in every fen village from here to the Wash. The water is owed and the water is patient and sometimes, when a woman has been taken and let go, the water uses her to put a child on the land. It puts it there through a woman who is neither ours nor its own, and that woman lives out by the gate, and she is with child now, and she is near her time, and when her hour comes the water will want the child delivered by a hand with skill in it and then named and handed back, because the water cannot make a thing and then take it. It has to be given. That is the Bond. That is all the Bond has ever been." "And the midwife names the child." "The midwife names the child," Drusilla said. "Not the mother, who is half in the water and will not care. Not the parson, who is afraid. The midwife. It is her office. It has been the office of six women and it will be the office of the seventh, and if the seventh will not do it the office falls to the parish, and a parish that does the midwife's work makes a ruin of it, as we did four years ago when we had no one, and as you have seen the mark of ever since you came." She looked at Eudora steadily. "You want to leave. I know it. You came here to lie down in a quiet place and you have found a parish with a wound in it that you have been made to put your hand inside. So. Here is my offer, and it is the same offer Loveday was given, and I will not dress it up. Do the office. Attend the woman at the gate when her hour comes. Deliver the child and name it and hand it to the water as the Bond requires. When it is done, the causeway will be dry within three weeks, and the parish will put you on the road to Oxmarsh with a good word and a year's pay and a letter to the county saying they treated you well. Refuse, and the water will take a name from the Roster, and I will not choose it, and I do not know whose it will be." "Whose name." "Any of the kept. That is what kept means. We pay the debt in those the water lets us keep, and the count decides, and the count never stops being kept." Drusilla leaned forward. "You signed the Roster in the chapel. You are on the page. That is not a threat, it is an arithmetic. The parish that has no midwife gives the water a midwife, and I have buried six women who did this work, and two of them were buried in the churchyard and four of them went out with the ebb, and I do not know any longer which of those is worse." Eudora stood by the window and looked at the dark and the water lying under the dark, and she thought about all of it, the way she thought at a difficult birth, slowly, taking the whole shape of the thing and turning it. She thought about Sibby Braccan in the chapel guest-room, still with child. She thought about the twin boy at the far end of the village, born on the eve of the Tithe, marked clean, and about the other Kept within a single page. She thought about the woman at the gate whom she had not yet seen, half of the water and half of the land, carrying a child the water had made and could not take without a hand. "I will attend her," Eudora said. "I will deliver the child, because no woman should lie down without a midwife, whatever she is carrying, and I will not let this parish deliver a woman shoulder to shoulder with a boat. That I will do." She turned from the window. "I will not promise to hand an infant to the water until I have seen it with my own eyes, and I will not sign anything tonight. Go home, Mrs. Rennock. Tell the gate to expect me at first light." Drusilla rose and took up her lantern, and at the door she paused and looked back. "You are doing the office," she said. "Whether you mean to or not. The hand that is in the room when a child comes is the hand that names it. That is the office. The rest is only the parish's way of writing down what you have already done." Eudora stood in the dark a long while after the door had closed. She knew what she had been offered, and she knew what she had refused, and she also knew that she had not refused the whole of it, and that the part she had not refused would be enough for Drusilla Rennock to build on. She had said she would attend a woman at the gate. She had said she would not hand a child to the water until she had seen it with her own eyes. Both of those were true, and both of them were also doors, and it is the nature of a door that a parish will walk through it whether the woman who opened it meant them to or not. She thought about the woman at the gate, whom she had never seen and who by all accounts had stopped being an ordinary person twelve years ago on a spring night in the water. She thought about the thing in the reeds, its hand out and its palm up. She thought about the twin boy at the far end of the village, born on the ebb with a mark on neither foot, and about the arithmetic of a column that had always balanced by taking whatever was nearest and calling it owed. And then she did the thing she had been circling since the day she signed the book. She took out the ledger and opened it to the page where the midwives' names were written, and sat down with her own note-book beside it, and began at the first name and went down, one at a time, year by year, and wrote out beside each name what the ledger said had happened after, and when she had finished she had a page of her own that made the whole parish legible at last, and she sat and looked at it in the candlelight and did not like one line of it. ---