Item, one day book, not returned. Transfer House, Eastern Seat, outstanding at Lady Day
She went in the second week of May and it took two days and she was ill for one of them, which was the ribs and the winter and being forty-five.
You were told not to.
“I was.”
In writing. In a hand you trust. He put that in specifically so that you would not be able to talk yourself round it.
“Yes,” said Su’inn.
And you are going anyway.
“I am going anyway.”
Good, said Azaelis. I would have thought less of you.
She stopped in the middle of a road.
What.
“You have been building to that for eleven miles.”
I have been building to it since Loft, he admitted, and I wanted to have the conversation first, because if I had simply said go, you would have gone for me instead of for him, and you would have found that out in about a year and it would have spoiled the whole of it.
Cadder Fen did not know what to do with her and she had known it would not.
Two people crossed the road. That was all. Two out of about thirty she passed on the causeway and through the village, and both of them did it badly and one of them looked ashamed afterward, and the rest said good afternoon or nodded or did not look up, exactly as they had always done.
A woman she had never treated stopped her at the pump and put a hand on her forearm, the burned one, deliberately, and held it there for a moment and said nothing at all and went on.
Ansell Tarr’s mother came out of her door and stood in it and cried and did not say anything, and Su’inn stood in the road and let her, because there was nothing to be done about it and because leaving would have been worse.
And a man she had set a wrist for two winters ago put down his tools and came over and said, “They are saying you were dead.”
“I know what they are saying.”
“Aye,” he said. “Well. You were dead, and Ansell Tarr is eleven, and I have got no opinion about any of the rest of it.” He picked his tools back up. “You want to watch the causeway. It has gone soft at the second bend.”
Bircher was in a chair by the fire with his legs up on a stool and a blanket over them and he had got about a third smaller.
He looked up when she came in and his whole face went, in the way a face goes when it has stopped having the strength to do the other thing, and then he said:
“I wrote to you.”
“You did.”
“In writing. In a hand you trust.”
“You did,” said Su’inn, “and I have got it, and I have read it about eleven times, and I have decided that a man who tells somebody not to come is a man who has thought about them coming.”
Bircher put his head back against the chair.
“That is a disgraceful piece of reasoning,” he said.
“It is.”
“Sit down.”
She was there four days.
She did what she could, which was the ease, twice a day, over the chest and the left arm, and it did what the ease does, which is nothing except what it does. She got a girl from the village in to be shown how to bank a fire properly, because nobody had ever shown her and she had been burning three times the peat. She wrote to the diocesan house about the roof and did not tell him.
On the second evening he said, “They have called a sitting.”
“On the ninth of June.”
“Are you going.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Bircher.
“That is all? Good?”
“Madam, I am sixty-six and I have got a heart like a wet sack and I have been sitting in this chair for five weeks working out what I would say to you if you disobeyed me, and I got it down to that.” He shifted. “Good. Go. And do not go in there arranged.”
“Arranged.”
“They asked me eleven questions in March and I answered all eleven and I told them no lies, and I want you to understand exactly how I managed it, because it was not virtue.” He had his hands folded on the blanket. “It is that you can only be caught out on a thing you have arranged. If you go into that room with a position, they will find the edges of it, because there are four of them and one of you and they have all day. If you go in and simply say what is true when they ask you, there is nothing to find, because there is no shape to it. It is the only trick I have ever known and it took me thirty years to learn and it is not a trick at all.”
Su’inn sat by the fire.
“They are going to ask me what I am.”
“Yes.”
“I do not know what I am.”
“Then say that,” said Bircher, “and say it first, before they have got a word out, and watch what it does to the room.”
He gave her the day book on the third day.
He got her to move a stone in the floor of the vestry, which took twenty minutes and a bar and left her with a hand she was going to feel for a week, and under it in a tin box was the transfer house day book of the eastern seat, wrapped in oilcloth, exactly as it had gone into his coat two years ago on the floor of a mortuary room.
“I said I would give it to the province the day they told me what they meant to do with what is in it.”
“They have not told you.”
“They are going to sit for four days in June and decide,” said Bircher. “That is near enough for a man in a chair. And I would rather it walked into that room in your hands than went in a cart from a vestry after I am dead, because a book that arrives in a cart is a book, and a book that arrives in the hand of the woman it is about is a question.”
Su’inn stood in the vestry with a tin box.
“Father.”
“Do not.”
“I am going to say one thing and you may have it or not.”
“Then be quick,” said Bircher, “because I am going to have to sit down on the step and it is going to be undignified.”
“You went there on purpose,” said Su’inn. “You told me that in a yard two years ago and I have thought about it every week since, and I want you to know that I have never once wished you had not.”
The old man sat down on the step of his own vestry.
“Well,” he said, after a while. “There it is. That is the whole of the forty-two years, then.”
She left on the fourth morning.
He came to the gate, which took him a long time, and stood holding it, and neither of them said anything for a moment.
“I may come to the sitting,” said Bircher.
“You may not.”
“I may. There is a cart on the eighth and I have got a hat.”
“Father.”
“I know,” he said. “I know. I am saying it because I want to be a man who said it, and you are going to remember that I said it, and in about four months that is going to be worth something to you.” He let go of the gate. “Go on. And Su’inn.”
She stopped.
It was the first time he had used it. Two years, and he had said madam, and practitioner, and once, in a chapter yard, nothing at all.
“When they ask you what he is,” said Bircher, “do not defend him. They will be expecting it and they will take the whole day off you doing it, and you will lose, because there is nothing to say. Tell them what he has done. Not what he is. And let them work out the difference themselves, because a thing a man works out himself he does not argue with.”
“That is very good advice.”
“It is forty-two years of advice,” said Bircher, “and it is the last of it, and I have been keeping it back.”
Su’inn, said Azaelis, about a mile down the causeway.
“Not yet.”
I am not going to say anything about him. I want to say a thing about the book.
She kept walking with the tin box under her arm.
You are going to walk into a joint sitting of three authorities carrying the original of a document that a certified house has had listed as outstanding for two years, said Azaelis, and the moment you put it on that table, one of the three of them is going to have to say out loud who it belongs to.
“Yes.”
And there is no answer.
“No,” said Su’inn. “There is not.”
Su’inn. And there was something in it she had heard perhaps four times in two years. Whose idea was that?
“His,” she said. “He has had two years in a chair.”