Retained this day, one finder, to establish facts, the chapter being unable to establish them itself. Diocesan house, eastern seat, retainer book
She did not go out through the loose board behind the meal bins.
She finished the girl’s dressing first, which took eleven minutes, and Vasse stood in the doorway for all eleven of them without once looking impatient, and when the girl had gone Su’inn washed her hands and pulled the stool round and sat down on it.
“Sit,” she said. “There is one chair and it is bad.”
“I have had worse.”
“Not in this yard you have not.”
He sat in it. It was bad. She watched him find that out and be too well mannered to comment, and revised something about him upward.
“Whose are you,” she said.
“The diocesan chapter at the eastern seat retained me nine days ago to establish the facts of Father Bircher’s conduct, because they cannot establish them themselves and they know it.” He put the satchel on his knees. “That is the whole of my instruction. I am not asked to find you, I am not asked to form a view about what is in you, and I am specifically not asked to assist the province, which was a condition I put in writing because I have worked for a chapter before.”
“You are being very open.”
“I am being efficient. You are going to check every word of that and you have eleven days to do it in, and if I lie to you now I lose the only fortnight I have.” He undid the satchel. “May I take notes.”
“No.”
“Very well.”
Let him take notes, said Azaelis.
She did not answer that.
Su’inn. Let him take notes. A man who is writing is a man who is committing himself, and a man committing himself in his own hand in front of you is worth a great deal more than one you have to remember afterward.
“Tell me about the hearing,” she said to Vasse.
Su’inn.
“Eleven days,” said Vasse. “The diocesan house, in the chapter room, before three of his own and one from the province as observer. The question they have set themselves is whether he committed a theft of a certified house’s day book, or whether he performed a sacrament and the book followed.”
“Those are not the same question.”
“They are not even adjacent,” Vasse agreed. “But they are the two he has been charged under and a chapter will not invent a third. If it is theft he is finished. If it is a sacrament he is a man who resurrected somebody the province had lawfully hanged, and I would not care to be him for that either, but he keeps his station and his bread.”
“And which is it.”
“Madam, I have no idea. I have read the reconstructed day book, I have interviewed the factor twice and the boy Corvel three times, and I have spent four days at the eastern house measuring corridors.” He looked at her steadily. “There is a hole in the middle of my account the size of a room, and everybody who was in that room is either a defendant, an employee, or you.”
He is telling you the truth and he is telling you it in the order that gets him what he wants. Both. Do not mistake the first for the absence of the second.
“I know,” she said.
Vasse’s head came up perhaps half an inch.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing,” said Su’inn. “Go on.”
He went on for about twenty minutes and she gave him almost nothing, and he did not seem to mind, and around the twentieth minute she began to understand that he had not come for the account at all today. He had come to be looked at. He was letting her check him.
Which was competent, and she resented it, and it worked.
“You pause,” Vasse said.
“What?”
“You pause. Before about one answer in four.” He had not moved. “It is not the pause of a person choosing a lie, which is a different thing and has a different shape, and I have sat opposite that one perhaps two thousand times. It is the pause of a person being spoken to.”
The room was very quiet.
“There is a thing I have been told about your condition,” said Vasse, “which I have not believed, because the man who told me had it from a factor who had it from a boy of nineteen who was frightened. And I have watched you for twenty minutes and I am now going to do something ill mannered, and I apologise for it in advance.”
He turned slightly in the bad chair, and addressed the air about a foot to the left of her head.
“Sir,” he said. “I would like to hear from you at some point, and I understand that I cannot, and I want you to know that I have understood that, because I imagine it is a very great deal of the difficulty.”
Su’inn did not say anything.
Inside her there was a silence of a kind she had not heard before, and it went on for some seconds, and when it ended it was not steady.
Tell him, said Azaelis, that in nine weeks he is the first person who has addressed me at all.
She sat on the stool with her hands on her knees.
“He says you are the first person in nine weeks who has spoken to him.”
Vasse looked at her for a long moment.
“That is very sad,” he said, “and I am not going to make anything of it, because I would be making something of it and we would both know.”
I like him.
“He likes you.”
“Yes, well,” said Vasse. “He is four hundred years old and I have just been kind to him once. That is not a very high wall to get over.”
Take the wheel.
“No.”
Su’inn, I am not asking to be let out. I am telling you that in about four minutes he is going to ask you the one question that decides this, and there are two answers to it, and I know which one a chapter will do what you want with because I have been in front of eleven of them and you have been in front of one and it hanged you.
“No.”
You are being proud.
“I am being the person he came to see.” She kept her voice down. “He has been eight days on my road and he sat in a bad chair for twenty minutes letting me look at him. If a woman he has been assessing since Cauldry suddenly starts talking like a provincial advocate, he will know inside two sentences, and everything he has told me today he will start telling somebody else.”
There was a pause.
That is correct, said Azaelis, and it had not occurred to me, and I dislike that a great deal.
The question came at the twenty-fourth minute and it was not the one she had been braced for.
“When Father Bircher performed the rite,” said Vasse, “did he know you were in there?”
“He did not know anything. He thought the body was empty.”
“That is what he says.”
“That is what happened.”
“Madam.” Vasse leaned forward slightly. “Understand what I am holding. If he did not know, he is a man who performed a sacrament in ignorance and the outcome is an accident, and a chapter can live with an accident. If he did know, if he had the least suspicion that there was a lawful continuation already lodged in that body and he went ahead, then he did not perform a sacrament. He committed an assault upon a certified vessel, and his own chapter will hand him to the province before the day is out, and there will be no hearing at all.”
Su’inn sat very still.
“He did not know.”
“Can you swear to that?”
“I was dead,” said Su’inn. “I was not in the room. I have the word of a man who was standing behind him, and that man is not a witness anybody will hear.”
Tell him.
“Tell him what.”
Tell him that the factor’s day book, in the version I saw over his shoulder, has the transfer entered at the third bell and the rite is not in it at all, because Sarl had not got to the third line. Tell him that the reconstruction has a date wrong, which he has already told you. And then tell him to compare the entered hour of the transfer with the hour on the priest’s travel warrant from the eastern seat, because a man who was behind a broken axle on the Halverside road has a warrant with a time on it, and it will show that Bircher left before the transfer was performed.
Su’inn opened her mouth.
He cannot have known, said Azaelis, because he set out before it happened. That is not testimony. That is arithmetic, and a chapter cannot argue with a stable.
She told him.
Vasse listened to all of it without moving, and then he sat back in the bad chair and looked at the ceiling for a while.
“Madam,” he said, “did you work that out just now?”
“No.”
“No,” Vasse agreed. “You did not.”
He was at the curtain before he stopped and turned around, and she had the strong impression that this was the part he had come for and that everything else had been the twenty minutes.
“One more thing, and then I will go and let you decide about the meal bins.”
“Go on.”
“I have been through the certification queue at the eastern seat for the last eleven years, because that is the sort of thing I do and nobody else can bear it.” He had the satchel under his arm. “The mean wait between a notice of need and an available vessel, in that province, over eleven years, is thirteen months and some days. The shortest before yours was seven months and two weeks.”
Su’inn waited.
“Yours was nineteen days,” said Vasse.
The room did a thing.
“That is not a scandal on its own,” he went on, evenly. “Queues move. Benches sit. There are eleven perfectly dull explanations and I have chased four of them down and they are not it, and I have seven left and I will chase those too.” He put a hand on the curtain. “But you were arrested eight weeks after a ward register entry, and you were tried in a morning, and you were given twelve days, and a man in the country had a notice on his table nineteen days after asking, with your body on it and a date already set.”
He looked at her.
“And I have not yet found the hand that moved it. But I want you to know that I am not looking for a hand because I have a theory. I am looking for one because there is a gap in the paper about that size, and gaps that size do not occur.”
He went out through the curtain.
Su’inn sat on the stool in a room with no window and listened to a man walk away across a drovers’ yard.
Su’inn, said Azaelis.
“Not now.”
Su’inn, I want to say something and I want to say it before you have had time to think, because in about an hour you will have thought and it will be too late to be worth anything.
“Then say it.”
I did not know, he said. I asked. In the house, in front of the factor, I asked him why it was nineteen days and he told me the bench gave it to him, and I let it go. A pause. And I have been sitting here for six weeks knowing that I let it go, and I did not tell you, because I was waiting to find out whether it mattered.
Su’inn put her face in her hands.
“It mattered,” she said.
Yes.