第8章 What Drusilla Knew

Drusilla Rennock came to the house the next afternoon with a basket of sprats and a loaf, and sat down by the fire without being asked, and took off her boots, and did not mention the birth at all until Eudora did. "If you are going to tell me I killed him," Eudora said, "say it and go, and I will pack my bag." "I am not going to tell you anything of the kind." Drusilla set her stockinged feet toward the fire. "You saved a woman and a child last night, and the whole village knows it, and half the village is grateful and the other half is frightened, and both halves are wrong to feel either, because it is not your hands that decide. It never was. Sit down. I have brought you fish." Eudora sat down. She had been on her feet since dawn and had not eaten and had not been able to stop going over the night in her head, so she took the fish and the bread and ate, and Drusilla watched her eat the way an old nurse watches a young one, patiently, without rushing a thing that needed doing. "Tell me what the Bond is," Eudora said, when she had eaten. "Not what it wants. What it is." Drusilla was quiet a moment. The fire moved. Out at the back of the house the Skein ran high against its banks, and the flood-tide water knocked softly at the stones. "Two hundred years ago and more," Drusilla said, "this was a poorer parish than it is now, and the sea did not respect the limit it keeps today. There was a fever in the village and a hunger after it, and a hard spring, and in that spring the water came up over the whole hummock and stood three feet deep in the chapel for a month. The people had come here for the ground and the wildfowl and the reed, and the ground was drowning and the reed was rotting and there was no boat big enough to carry them all away. So they made a bargain. It is the kind of bargain people make when they have nothing. They said: take a share of our children, and let the rest of us live." "And the water answered them?" "There was a woman in the village then who spoke for the water, and her name does not matter now, and after the bargain she was never seen again, and her boat came back empty. That is the story. It is a story three hundred people have told their children for nine generations, and by now it is also a fact, which is a different and worse thing." Drusilla turned her hands over in her lap. "You have seen the marks. You know what they mean. Some children of Grithfen are born owed. They are not ours for long. When their time comes they are titled, which is a gentle word for a hard night, and they go into the water, and the water takes what it is owed, and the rest of us live." "How does it decide? The marks?" "The Bride decides. We do not know how, or why, or by what sign, and any man of this parish who tells you he knows is lying to you for want of an answer. But a midwife sees the marks first. That is why the midwife is keeper of the book. Forty years the book has been kept by a woman from outside the village, and every one of them was chosen for it, and every one of them, in the end, had to stand in the Roster and be counted with the rest." "Counted where?" "Wherever she is wanted," Drusilla said, and would not say more, and turned the conversation to the sprats. But before she left she stood at the door with her basket in the crook of her arm and looked out at the Skaithe going grey toward evening, and she said one more thing, and Eudora gathered it up and kept it the way she kept everything. "The causeway will go under in ten days for the spring tides and stay under three weeks, and no cart will pass it, and the ferry will not run to Oxmarsh, and there is not a horse in this village we would risk on the ford. Whatever you want to do about this parish, Eudora Cawdle, you will have to do it from inside, with us, because after the Tithe tide there will be no road out of Grithfen and there will be no way to ask anybody from outside what they think of us. That is the courtesy I am doing you. I am telling you the water is coming, and I am telling you when." When Drusilla had gone, Eudora sat a long while by the fire with the fish bones on the plate and the fire going down, and she did the thing she always did with a difficult case, which was to take it apart and lay the pieces out and see whether they could all be true at once. One: that two hundred years ago a drowning parish had made a bargain with the water. She did not believe in the bargain, and she believed absolutely that the people of Grithfen had made it, and she had learned in fifteen years of nursing that those two things can sit in the same room quite comfortably, because what a family believes about itself will kill or cure it as surely as any germ. Two: that the marks ran in the blood of the village and that the village had a rule for reading them. She had seen four marks in six weeks. That was the wrong number, medically. A birthmark of that kind should turn up in one child in a hundred, and here it was in one child in three or four, and the reason for that was either a thing in the water or a thing in the blood, and she could test for neither. Three: that the midwife was the hinge. Every rule, when she pushed it, folded back onto the same point. The cord over the salt. The count in the book. The child named before it was read. The one who is in the room when a baby comes is the one who says what the baby is, and everything else in this parish had been arranged so that there would always be a stranger's hand in that room, because no woman born here could be trusted with the naming. Four, which she did not write down even in her own book: that Drusilla Rennock had looked at her across the fire that afternoon with the exact expression of a woman who has just hired the next person to stand where she herself once stood, and had been honest about everything except that. She banked the fire and went to bed, and lay listening to the Skein run out under the floor, and understood that she was not a visitor here, and had not been one since the day she signed the book. A parish does not tell its secrets to a visitor. It tells them to the person it intends to keep. ---