第18章 The Count Is Kept

The causeway dried in eleven days, and the letter from the county came up on the first cart, and Eudora did not answer either of them. She read the letter standing at her own door with the child in her arm. It was from the clerk of the rural district, in answer to a letter she had not sent but had described in another, and it asked for further particulars of her concerns, and it was signed with a name she did not recognize, and she folded it and put it in the drawer and went back to the work, because the work was all there was now and it had grown. Sibby Braccan had come out of the chapel guest-room at the beginning of the week, well and quiet, eight months along and carrying high, and the whole village had made much of her as it made much of any woman who came close to her time, and the knock at Eudora's door came every day, and the door was answered every day. A croup in a fisherman's child. A suppurating cut on a boatwright's hand. The old man with the chest, who was worse. An entire village of aches and weathers, delivered one by one to a midwife who was now, in the way of such villages, no longer only a midwife, because a woman who has been present at the Tithe and has walked out of it unharmed has been given a weight in the parish that no appointment could give her and no dismissal could take away. The child slept in a wicker cradle by Eudora's bed. No one had ever said in so many words that the girl was hers to keep, and no one had taken her. After the night at the gate, Drusilla Rennock had come to the house in the morning and looked at the child for a long time without touching her, and had said only that the gate-house was no place for an infant and that the parish would be told the child was a foundling of the flood, which was true enough in the way the parish used truth. Then she had asked Eudora the question Eudora had been waiting for since the moment of the naming. "What will you do with her." "Keep her alive," Eudora said. "The parish will have opinions." "The parish may have them." Eudora looked down at the sleeping girl. "I delivered her with these hands and I named her with this mouth and she has no other person in this world who will speak for her. That is not a question for the parish." Drusilla had studied her then in a way that Eudora could not read, and had gone away, and the child had stayed, and the days had gone by, and the village had watched. The village watched the child the way it watched the water. When Eudora walked her along the street in the sling, women stopped what they were doing and looked, and some of them said good morning and some of them did not, and the children, who had no fear of anything, came up and looked into the sling and asked her name, and when Eudora said Loveday they nodded as if this made sense and ran off and went back to their counting games. In the chapel on the second Sunday, when the child was brought to the Reading, the whole village stood, and Drusilla read a single name into the cold air and said nothing after it, neither Kept nor any other word, and the silence after the name went on so long that Eudora could hear the reeds outside. She took the child home and sat by the fire and fed her and held her, and in the fourth week she began to notice the things that a good nurse notices before she lets herself name them. The girl did not startle at the ninth bell. Every other infant in Grithfen woke and cried at the first stroke of it, as infants wake to any loud sound, and this one never did, never once, and slept through it with her small face smooth. She was calm in a way that no healthy newborn of Eudora's long experience was calm; she was calm the way deep water is calm, and when Eudora fed her with the fire behind her, the eyes that looked up at her held the light and did not let it go. The work went on. And the water went on, coming and going the way it had come and gone for a thousand years, and the village went on the way it had gone on for nine generations, and the count, if anyone had asked Eudora Cawdle whether the count was kept, would have been answered by the simple fact that the causeway was dry and the road was open and not one child had been put into the hollow boat in the whole of that winter. Not one except the one who had walked into the channel in her own two feet, in her own white nightdress, of her own free will, which Eudora had watched happen and had done nothing to stop, and which she had begun, in the small hours of the night, to understand as the thing she had been hired to arrange. The letter from the county stayed in the drawer. She read it a second time, later that week, and a third, and each time it asked the same flat question in the same flat clerk's prose, and each time she found that she could not answer it without writing down words that would bring men with wing collars and notebooks out across the dry causeway to look at a village full of salt and counting games and a child with quiet eyes asleep in a wicker cradle. She had written reports before, in the city, and she knew what a report did. A report went into a file and the file went into a place, and the place sent a letter back, and the letter asked for further particulars, and while the letters went back and forth the thing that was happening kept happening, and at the end of it the file was closed and everybody was very sorry and nothing had changed. She understood that she was, in the technical sense, sheltering a thing she could not explain. She understood that if she walked out over the causeway and told the whole of it to the first magistrate she met, she would be believed by nobody and locked up by somebody, and the child in the cradle would be taken away to a place with white walls and iron beds, and the parish would write to the county asking for a new midwife, and in a year there would be a seventh woman's name in the column and the counting would go on exactly as it had gone on before. So she kept the letter, and did not answer it, and did the work, and held the child, and watched her the way a midwife watches a newborn she has decided to keep. And the weeks went on, and the salt lay on the sills, and the ninth bell rang every evening at half past six, and no one in Grithfen spoke of Mirabel Ossel, who had walked into the water in her nightdress while the whole parish watched, and whose name was written in the first column of the ledger in a steady hand, with nothing at all in the third. ---