Her advocate’s name was Corliss and he was thirty-one years old and he was very good, and that was the difficulty.
He came to her three times. The first time he brought the file and read her the parts of it he thought she would not have seen, which was thoughtful and turned out to be nothing, because she had seen all of it once, twenty-one years ago, when it was still only a room and a body and not yet a paper.
The second time he brought nothing and asked her why.
“I have answered that.”
“You have said that you did it. That is not the same question and you know it is not.”
“Then ask a better one.”
“Practitioner.” He set his hands flat on the table between them, and he had good hands, and she noticed them the way she noticed everyone’s, which was as a list of what they could still do. “There were no witnesses in that house. There is no account in this file of anything that happened inside it before the night in question, because nobody ever went in and asked, because he was who he was and the ward took his household on his word. Which means the only account that exists is yours. Which means that whatever you say happened is the only thing anybody will ever have.”
“Yes.”
“So say it.”
“No.”
Corliss waited a long time.
“May I tell you what I think,” he said, “and you may correct me or not.”
“You may tell me. I am unlikely to correct you.”
“I think there is an account. I think it is a long one. I think that if you gave it to me I would take it to the bench and the bench would take twenty-one years and a burned arm and a woman who has spent every one of those years putting people back together, and it would come down somewhere a very great deal short of the sentence.” He said it without any heat at all. “I have done nine of these. I know what a bench does with a thing like that. I am not guessing.”
“I believe you.”
“Then why.”
Su’inn looked at the window, which was high and narrow and had a piece of the yard in it and nothing else.
“Because it is not an argument,” she said. “It is a description of a night. And the moment I hand it to you it stops being a night that happened to me and becomes a document that four men read out to each other in a room, and then it is theirs, and then every single one of them gets to decide whether it was enough.” She turned back. “It was enough. I decided that. I decided it while I was still in the house and I have not revisited it in twenty-one years and I am not going to open it up now so that a bench can have a view.”
“That is pride.”
“It might be.”
“It is going to kill you.”
“It might do that as well,” Su’inn agreed. “You are a good advocate, Corliss. I want that written down somewhere. You did the whole thing correctly and I was the flaw in it.”
The third time he came he did not ask again. He sat with her for an hour and talked about his sister’s shoulder, and she told him what to do about his sister’s shoulder, and he wrote it down.
The trial took a morning.
Nobody in the room was cruel. That was the thing she had not expected and did not care for. The prosecuting man was tired and correct. The bench was four men and one of them had a cough and kept apologizing for it with his hand up. Vennick sat at the back with his case on his knees and did not look at her once, which she understood by then to be a kindness of a particular provincial sort.
The facts went in and none of them were wrong.
She had married at nineteen. She had lived in a house in Halverside for four years. On a night in the autumn of her twenty-third year she had killed her husband in that house, with a fire iron, having first been badly burned along the left arm, and the burn was in the record because the ward physician had dressed it at the time and made a note.
Cause of the burn: unknown.
That was what the paper said. Twenty-one years, three clerks, one bench, and the paper still said unknown, because in twenty-one years nobody had ever needed it to say anything else.
Corliss stood up when it was his turn and did what he could with what she had given him, which was almost nothing, and he did it beautifully, and she was sorry about that in a way she was not sorry about anything else that morning.
They asked her if she wished to speak.
“No,” Su’inn said.
The man with the cough put his hand up and apologized.
They gave her twelve days.
She had expected less and had not expected to mind, and then found the twelve days very hard, because twelve days is long enough to be bored and boredom is where a mind goes places it has been staying out of.
She did what she could with it. She wrote to Ferrow twice. The first letter was the slow, and the close, and the stay, all three set down in order, in as few words as she could get them into, with the places people went wrong marked out. Nine years of a trade in a page and a half. It had taken her four hours and she had thrown away six attempts, and when she finally had it right she sat and looked at it and thought, with real bitterness, that is all it was.
The second letter said: the woman in Ellersgate is called Hess and she is not a fraud and I knew that. Go to her. Take my name and she will not care and take it anyway. Tell her I said the wrist first.
She did not write to anyone else. There was not anyone else, which she had known in the abstract and found different as a fact.
On the ninth day the priest came.
He was a priest of Salvos, and old, and out of breath from the stairs, and he sat down without being asked and put both hands on his knees and said, “They tell me you will not say why.”
“They tell everyone.”
“I have read the file.”
“So has everybody in the province.”
“I have read it,” he said, “and there is a note in it from a physician about a burn, and the burn is on the inside of the forearm and the palm and the fingers.” He looked at her. “I have dressed a great many burns, practitioner. In fifty years I have never once seen a person burn the inside of their own arm.”
Su’inn did not say anything.
“I am not going to ask you,” the old man said. “I am too old to spend an afternoon losing to somebody. I am going to tell you that I am going to write to the provincial office, and to the bench, and to my own chapter, and that it will not arrive in time, and that I am going to do it anyway, and that you cannot stop me because it is my hand and my paper.”
“That is true.”
“Yes.” He got up. It took him a while. “Is there anything you would like from me.”
“No.”
“That is what I thought.” At the door he stopped. “I am going to say this badly. There is a thing that happens to people who decide something once and never look at it again. It keeps very well. It does not spoil. But it also does not grow, and one day you find you have been carrying a thing for twenty years that you would not choose today, and it is too heavy to put down, because putting it down would mean the twenty years were the mistake and not the night.”
“I know,” Su’inn said.
The old man looked genuinely surprised.
“You know.”
“I am not stupid. I am decided. They are different.” She sat back. “Go and write your letter, father.”
They came for her at the fourth bell on the twelfth day.
It was raining, which she was obscurely pleased about, having decided at some point in the last week that she did not want it to be a nice morning. The yard was small and there were nine people in it and none of them were there for her. Two ward men, the bench’s clerk, the coroner, a physician, and four she did not recognize who stood together near the wall and had the look of people waiting for a delivery.
One of them had a ledger.
She looked at the man with the ledger for a while, because he was the only interesting thing in the yard. He was checking something against something else, and once he glanced up at her, briefly, in the flat assessing way she had seen a thousand times in her own work, the way you look at a joint before you touch it.
Oh, she thought.
She had not known. It was not in the file and nobody had said it and it had never once occurred to her, in twelve days, to wonder what happened to a body afterward, which she considered, in the moment she understood it, to be a genuinely remarkable failure of imagination in a woman who had spent nine years learning what bodies were.
Somebody was going to have her.
She stood in the rain and turned that over and found, to her own surprise, that she was not frightened by it and not even particularly angry. It was administrative. It had the same texture as everything else that morning. A man in a yard with a ledger, waiting for stock.
He is going to be so annoyed about the hand, she thought.
And then she laughed, once, out loud, and it came out wrong and too loud in the rain, and every person in the yard turned to look at her, and the physician took half a step forward with his face changing, and she waved him off with her right hand and got hold of herself.
“Sorry,” she said. “Nothing. Sorry.”
They read the sentence. It was four sentences and it took no time at all and she did not hear the middle of it.
The coroner asked if she wished to speak.
She thought about Bel’s arm, third day, not the second, not the fourth. She thought about Ferrow’s face on the cart rail and the word ask. She thought about a page and a half that had taken her four hours and was the entirety of what she had, and about whether Hess in Ellersgate would take a letter from a woman who had been hanged, and decided that she would, because the trade was the trade and Hess had trained at the low house too.
She thought: I did it. And then, for the first time in twenty-one years, standing in a wet yard with nine people waiting on her: and I have never once said out loud what he did.
Not to Corliss. Not to the old priest. Not to Vennick on the road. Not to Ferrow in four years.
Not to anyone, ever, in her whole life.
There was still time. There was easily time. There were four men against the wall with a ledger and a cart and it would take one sentence and everyone in this yard would hear it and it would be in the record forever and no bench would ever be able to take it out again.
“No,” said Su’inn. “Nothing.”
The rain kept on.
Somebody put a hand on her shoulder, which was gentle, and unnecessary, and the last thing.