第16章 The Woman at the Gate

The house at the gate stood in the lee of the sluice, stone on the outside, reeds on the roof, one room and a chimney and a woodpile that never seemed to want for wood, and Eudora went out to it in the first grey of the morning with her bag over her shoulder and Godwin Grike walking behind her without being asked. "You did not have to come," she said. "I bring her her bread," Grike said. "I have brought it seven years. If I stop bringing it she will not eat it and I will not be able to say why." He poled her across the last channel in the punt and left her at the door and went away to the shed, and Eudora understood that this was how the village handled the woman at the gate: one man, one loaf, no questions, so that nobody else had to think about it. The woman who opened the door was called Mirabel Ossel, and she was perhaps thirty, and she was with child to the point where Eudora's first professional thought, which was stronger than fear and older than it, was that the head was engaged and the birth was days away, not weeks. "Sit," Mirabel said. "I know why you are here. Everybody who comes here knows why." The room had a bed and a table and a chair and a window with no glass in it, only a shutter, and the floor was packed earth, and the walls had reeds hanging from nails in bundles to dry. It smelled of peat smoke and damp stone and, faintly, permanently, of the Skein. Mirabel Ossel sat down on the bed and put her hands on the great curve of the child and looked at Eudora with pale quiet eyes, and there was sedge in her hair, not by accident, arranged, a few strands of brown jointed reed wound back into her braid the way another woman would pin in a ribbon. "You have seen it," Mirabel said. "Out in the reeds. It held its hand out to you." "How do you know that." "Because it told me. It does not talk the way you and I talk, but it told me, and it said you did not come and take the hand, and that pleased it, because it does not want a frightened hand on the child." Mirabel said all of it in the flat tone of a woman reporting the weather. "I was seven when it took me. My father's boat went over and I went with it and the water kept me under a whole night and gave me back in the morning on the water-meadow with no water in my lungs and sedge in my hair that never came out. I was owed. My name was in the book. And the parish did not title me, because the water had already had me and given me back, and a thing given back cannot be taken again. So I was set apart. I have lived out here since I was old enough to live alone. I mind the gate in winter and I take the bread and I speak to the water, and seven months ago the water asked me for this." She touched her belly. "It is not a punishment. I want you to understand that. It is the only thing I have ever been asked to do, and I said yes, and I would say yes again." Eudora sat down on the chair and took out her book, because her hands needed something to do, and did the examination the way she would have done it anywhere, and the child was well placed and the woman was healthy and there was, by every measure a trained midwife could bring to bear, nothing wrong. A living child, a healthy mother, a house by a gate, and in the mother's hair a strand of reed that had been arranged there by hand. "You will deliver it," Mirabel said. "And then Mrs. Rennock will do the rest, or Godwin will, and it will go into the boat and out with the ebb, and I will be let go, and that is the bargain and I have kept it." She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. "You are a good woman. I heard you cut the cord over the salt. You will do the office properly and the parish will let you go and you will never see Grithfen again, and you will be, I am almost sure, glad." Eudora walked back to the village in the full light with Grike's punt behind her and the Skein running in under the houses, and she could not put her finger on what had disturbed her most, and then on the raised path between the sedge banks it came to her, and she stopped still. The woman at the gate had known her name. Eudora had not told it to her. She had told it to no one out there. And the child in the woman's belly had been lying head-down and ready, and that meant the birth was due, and the Tithe tide ran in five nights' time, and there was no room in any of it for the village's plans to be wrong. She went home and opened her book and, under the line she had written beside her own name, she wrote the other names, all of them, everybody who could pay the debt in her place if she would not do the office. Sibby Braccan. Sibby Braccan's unborn child. The twin boy born on the ebb with the mark on neither foot. Then she sat with the pen and looked at the list for a long time, and she understood that she had been given an arithmetic of her own at last, and that she would have to work it out before the water came. The water was five nights away, and she counted them the way the parish counted everything. On the first night she went to the chapel guest-room and sat with Sibby Braccan, who was not in labour and knew it, and told her without any softening what Eudora had learned at the gate: that the child in the gate-house was the water's own and would be born at the Tithe, and that this year the Tithe might be paid by the woman who bore it rather than by any child. Sibby listened with her hands on her belly and did not ask a single question, and at the end of it she said only, "Then it will want mine too, in the end. It always wants the nearest." And Eudora said, "Not while I have hands," and Sibby looked at her a long time and did not laugh, because a woman eight months gone in a parish like Grithfen does not laugh at promises; she files them away and remembers. On the second night the village began to prepare, and Eudora watched it from her window and could not afterward have said what the preparing consisted of, because there was no outward sign of it that a stranger would have noticed. Nobody whitewashed a wall. Nobody carried a thing from one house to another. But the whole parish changed its rhythm the way it changed its rhythm before the ninth bell, and the doors opened and shut in a different order, and the nets came in early, and the children were called home before dark, and by the third night the street was empty by six and the only sound in Grithfen was the Skein running in under the boards and the reeds at the north talking to themselves. On the fourth night she bathed the child at the hearth with the water warm and the fire up and the door bolted, and the girl looked up at her out of the water with her quiet eyes and did not cry, and Eudora dried her and wrapped her and held her a long while, and found that she was talking to her, low and steady, the way a midwife talks to a woman in labour. "Five nights," she said. "Five nights and then I will know what you are, and what I have made of myself by keeping you." ---