The chapter sat on the ninth. Present: three of the chapter, one of the province as observer, and such persons as presented themselves at the gate. Diocesan house, eastern seat, minute
You are going in.
“I am going in.”
Su’inn, there are three of that order in this province and a chapter room full of people and one observer from the provincial office, and every single one of them has seen a description of you in the last fortnight.
“I know.”
And I am going out on the step and I will not be able to tell you anything for as long as you are in that building, and if it goes wrong I will find out about it by arriving in a cell.
“I know that as well.”
She stood in the lane opposite the gate with her hood back, because a woman with her hood up at a chapter gate is a woman with her hood up.
“He sat two hours behind an axle,” she said. “For a woman he had met once, who told him she wanted nothing from him, and he did it anyway with his hand and his paper. And I am not going to be a rumour in a lane while four men decide what to do with him.”
There was a pause.
Then go in, said Azaelis. And I want it on the record, in the lane, that I think this is a bad decision and that I would do the same thing.
“That is not much of a position.”
It is the only one I have ever had, he said. Go on.
She walked across and through the gate, and on the third flagstone he went out like a lamp.
The chapter room had a long table with four men behind it and about thirty chairs, and perhaps ten of the chairs had people in them, and she sat at the back on the aisle where a person sits who intends to be able to leave.
She was inside two minutes before she understood something about the building that she had not expected.
It was quiet in her.
Not the quiet of the church at Halverside, which had been a stone box with a hole in the middle of it. This was different, and it took her most of the first hour to find the word for it, and the word was rested.
Eleven weeks. Eleven weeks of a second person in every room, every meal, every bath, every wakeful hour of every night, of never once having a thought without an audience even though he could not hear it, and she had not understood the weight of that at all until it came off.
She sat in a chapter room with her hands in her lap and was, for two hours, exactly one person.
It was wonderful.
She hated how wonderful it was.
Bircher looked terrible and sounded fine.
They had him in a chair rather than standing, which she supposed was the chapter being decent about his legs, and he answered everything he was asked in a flat unhurried voice with no self-pity in it anywhere.
Had he performed the rite. He had.
Had he been in possession of the stay of sentence. He had. It had come to his hand at three, he had gone directly, there was an axle on the Halverside road.
Had he known there was a lawful continuation lodged in the vessel. He had not.
“You will forgive me, father,” said the youngest of the four, who had a good voice and was using it, “but that is exactly what you would say.”
“It is,” Bircher agreed. “It is also true, and I have been sitting in a room for nine weeks working out how a man proves a thing he did not know, and I have not managed it, and I am sixty-four and I have stopped expecting to.”
“Then we are left with your word.”
“You are left with a stable,” said Vasse, from the second row.
He was very good.
She had thought he would be, because she had watched him be very good in a drovers’ yard while sitting in a bad chair, but there was a difference between that and a chapter room, and the difference was that in a chapter room he was slower.
He gave them the travel warrant. He gave them the hour on it. He gave them the ostler who had not fixed the axle and could say so, and the ostler said so, in about nine words, in a voice like a man being asked to describe a wall.
Then he gave them the transfer house day book, both versions, and the eleven minutes it took him to walk four clerics through the difference between an original and a reconstruction were the eleven most boring minutes of her life and she understood, watching the faces at the long table, that they were also the eleven that mattered.
“The rite was performed at half past four,” said Vasse. “The transfer at three. Father Bircher left this town at eleven in the morning. Reverend sirs, whatever else is in dispute, the man could not have known a thing that had not yet occurred, unless you are prepared to find that a priest of this chapter can see forward in time, and I would suggest that if he could, the province has larger business with him than a book.”
Somebody at the back laughed.
The eldest of the four did not.
“That establishes ignorance,” he said. “It does not establish the book. He took a certified house’s day book out of that house and put it inside his coat, and he has not returned it, and he has told this chapter that he will not.”
“No,” said Bircher. “I will not.”
“Why.”
The old man sat in his chair with his bad legs out in front of him.
“Because a woman on the floor of that room asked me to,” he said, “and she was a woman I had put back into the world about an hour before, and I have been a priest for forty years and I have never once been asked for anything by somebody in that condition, and I did not think about it, and I would like to tell this chapter that I have thought about it a great deal since and I have not improved on what I did.”
The room was quiet.
“And where is the book now, father?”
“It is in a safe place,” said Bircher, “and I will give it to the province the day they tell me what they intend to do with what is written in it, and not one hour before.”
They put him out for the vote and the eleven people in the chairs went out with him, and Su’inn stood in the cloister for forty minutes with her hands in her sleeves.
Onnie Fell was on the far side of it, sitting on the low wall.
Neither of them went over. Onnie looked at her once, across sixty feet of wet grass, and put two fingers up off her knee, and that was the whole of it, and it was enough, and Su’inn stood where she was and did not spoil it.
It took them thirty-five minutes.
No finding of theft, the eldest read out, in the voice of a man reading a thing he had personally lost an argument about. The chapter finds the removal of the book incidental to the rite and not to be treated as a taking. The chapter finds the rite performed in ignorance and therefore validly performed.
Bircher put his hand over his eyes.
The chapter finds further, the old man went on, that the priest’s conduct in going to the bench upon a matter of a physician’s note, without instruction and without the knowledge of his superior, was irregular, and the chapter records its disapproval, and directs that he be moved from the almshouse station at the eastern seat to the parish of Cadder Fen with effect from Michaelmas.
Somebody in the room made a small noise.
Su’inn did not know where Cadder Fen was. She found out later. It was eleven miles of wet ground and about ninety people and no almshouse and no infirmary and the nearest physician was a day away, and the previous man had been there two years and had asked four times to be moved.
They had found him innocent and then they had put him somewhere he could not do it again.
Bircher took his hand off his eyes and said, “Thank you, reverend sirs,” and meant it, and that was the part she could not get past for a long time afterward.
She caught him in the outer yard because he was slow and she was not.
“Father.”
He turned round.
She watched it arrive in his face, all of it, in about a second and a half, and then he got hold of it, because he had been getting hold of things for forty years.
“You should not be here,” he said.
“No.”
“They will.”
“They will not. There are three of them in the province and they are all at the north gate looking for a woman in a hood.” She stood in front of him. “Cadder Fen.”
“Cadder Fen.” He almost smiled. “It is eleven miles of bog and ninety people who have had nobody for a year. I am sixty-four with a bad heart and it will very likely finish me, and I want you to know that I have been trying since half past ten to be properly angry about it and I cannot manage it, because there is nobody there.”
“That is not why they sent you.”
“No,” said Bircher. “It is not. But it is where I am going.” He looked at her for a moment. “Is he there?”
“Not in here. Not on this ground.”
“Ah.” The old man nodded slowly. “Then I will say it to you and you may pass it on or not. Tell him I have thought about him a great deal in nine weeks, and that I do not know what he is, and that I have decided it is not my business to know, and that on the ninth of the month a chapter found that what I did that afternoon was validly performed.” He put his hat on. “Which means, whatever else it means, that somebody with the authority to say so has now written down that you are alive.”
Su’inn stood in the yard.
“I had not thought of it like that.”
“No,” said Bircher. “You would not have. You have been running.” He started for the gate, and stopped. “You were not a mistake, madam. I have been calling it a mistake for nine weeks because it was the only word I had that they would accept. It was not one. I went there on purpose.”