Died at this house on the eleventh, a clergyman, name of Bircher, of the parish of Cadder Fen, aged sixty-six. Effects held. The Bell, eastern seat, day book
He came back on the fourth step and she was already talking.
“There is no date.”
What?
“There is no date. They could not do it. They found both of them correct and neither of them able to be preferred and they wrote down that they could not arrive at a determination, and they set it down for a further sitting at a date to be fixed, and Tersey looked at me down the whole length of the table and said there is no date.”
She was standing in the middle of the yard of the diocesan house at the eastern seat at half past eight in the evening in June, saying it out loud, and people were going past.
Su’inn.
“And no process is to issue out of any of the three of them. Not the province, not the chapter, not the house of Nekros. Pending a determination. And there is no determination and there is not going to be one, because the moment any one of them touches it they have to be the one who decided, and there was a man from the crusade in that room for two days who said out loud that he had not met a single person who wanted it to be their signature.”
There was a silence.
You did that.
“I did not do it. A priest with a bad heart put a book under a stone for two years and then gave it to me, and a man from Warring Cross got on a canal boat, and a factor stood up in front of three authorities and took himself apart line by line for fifty minutes, and a finder spent two years being dull in public.” She was walking now, badly, because her legs had gone. “And I stood up for eleven minutes and told them what you had done.”
Which parts.
“All of them,” said Su’inn. “In order. Including the ones you would not have said.”
Ah.
“Do you want to know which one did it?”
No, said Azaelis. I want to sit with not knowing for a day, and then I want you to tell me, and I would like the day.
Marchant went home on the Friday.
He would not stay and he would not take money and he had an argument with her about the money for about ten minutes and won it, on the grounds that he had come for himself and not for anybody else and that being paid for it would make it a different thing.
He took the primer.
She had thought he might leave it and she had been half hoping, and she watched him wrap it back into the oiled cloth and put it in the canvas bag, and understood that he was right and that she had wanted it for the wrong reason.
“Will you write,” she said.
“No,” said Tobe Marchant. “I have got what I came for, and if I write to you then in about four years I will be a man who writes to you, and that is not the same and I would rather have the nine days.” He put his hat on. “Tell him I said the primer is looked after. Tell him the boy is sixty-two and reads about four books a year and one of them is usually a bad one, and that he ought to know both halves of that as well.”
The news about Bircher came on the Saturday and it came from a chapter clerk who was tidying up after the sitting and did not know who she was.
He came out into the yard with a paper in his hand and said, to nobody in particular, that somebody would have to write to Cadder Fen because the man had been in a house on Cutler Street since Tuesday and there was a hat and a bag and nobody had come.
She had to ask him twice.
Then she went up Cutler Street at a run at the age of forty-five with four half-healed ribs and got there in about six minutes, and stood in the doorway of the Bell with her hand on the frame and could not make the words come out, and the woman behind the counter looked at her face and said, “Ah. You will be the one he said might come.”
He had got on the cart on the eighth.
He had told nobody at Cadder Fen where he was going, which was so entirely in character that she laughed and then had to stop. He had arrived on the evening of the ninth, which was the first day, and he had gone to bed and had not got up again, and the woman at the Bell had had a physician to him on the tenth and the physician had said what physicians say about a heart at sixty-six.
He had died on the eleventh in the afternoon, which was the third day, which was the day the crusade spoke.
Nobody had known to tell her. He was a clergyman in a room in a town full of clergy in a week when the whole diocesan house was sitting on something, and he had given his name at the door as Bircher of Cadder Fen and nobody at the Bell had any reason on earth to connect that with a woman at a table three streets away.
“He asked about the sitting every day,” said the woman at the Bell. “Every day, and twice on the tenth. And I sent the boy round on the tenth and the boy came back and said they were still at it, and he said, good, that is good, they are supposed to be a long time.”
Su’inn stood in the passage.
“Did he say anything else.”
“He said a great deal, he was a talker.” The woman folded a cloth. “He said the roof at his church was going to fall in about four years and that he was extremely pleased not to be there for it.”
There was a bag and a hat and eleven shillings and a letter.
The letter was addressed to her by name, both names, in a hand that had gone very shaky and had clearly taken him a while, and the woman at the Bell had been keeping it behind the counter for five days and had been meaning to give it to the chapter on the Monday.
Su’inn took it out into the yard and sat down on a mounting block and opened it.
It was about the roof.
It was four pages about the roof, in detail, with the names of two men in the parish who could be got to do it cheaply and the name of a third who could not be got at all and should not be asked, and a note about where the diocesan house kept the fabric returns and how to word a request so that it went to the right clerk.
On the last page it said:
I have been trying to write you the other letter since March and I have started it four times and it is not any good, and I have decided that a man who has spent forty-two years telling other people what to say ought to be allowed to be bad at it once.
So here is what I have got. You went in there. That is the whole of it. I have thought about you a great deal since February and I have not once been able to work out what you are, and I have decided that this is because it is not a question, and that I was asking it because everyone else was.
The roof is a question. Have the roof.
She sat on the mounting block in the yard of the Bell for a long time.
Su’inn, said Azaelis, eventually.
“Not yet.”
I am not going to say anything about him. I want to say a thing about the letter and it is practical.
“Then say it.”
He has left you a parish, said Azaelis. That is what that is. He has left you two men who will do a roof cheaply and a third who should not be asked, and the name of a clerk, and the way to word it. That is not a letter about a roof. That is a man handing over a set of keys and being too polite to say so.
Su’inn sat with the four pages in her hands.
“He told me not to come back.”
He told you not to come back while he was in it, said Azaelis. He is not in it.
They buried him at Cadder Fen on the nineteenth because she wrote to the chapter and asked for it and Vasse wrote underneath her letter and made it a thing that would be granted, and about sixty people came, which for a parish of ninety-one in a wet June is nearly all of them.
Ansell Tarr came with two fingers short.
Nobody crossed the road.
Afterward Su’inn stood in the churchyard with the rain starting and looked at the corner of the roof that was going to come in about four years, and did the arithmetic on the fabric returns, and found that she was already doing it, and stopped, and let herself stand still for a moment.
How long, said Azaelis.
“What?”
You have been standing here looking at a roof for eleven minutes and I have not said anything, and I would like to know how long you are proposing to stay in this parish, because I have got about a thousand and twenty hours and I would like to know what I am spending them on.
Su’inn stood in the rain in a churchyard.
“The rest of it,” she said.