Chapter 65: The Message No One Ordered

She had learned to write at nine, in a convent, from a woman who had beaten her hands for a slanted letter and who had been, in every other respect Venessa could remember, kind. She had not thought about that woman in years and had thought about her twice in the last month, which was another new development she did not like.

She wrote small and fast on a piece of paper about the size of her palm, sitting on the edge of the bed with a board on her knees and a rushlight guttering on the floor beside her, because a rushlight from the floor throws no shadow on a shutter.

She wrote what she always wrote, in the way she had been taught to write it: no names where a rank would do, no place on its own line, nothing that could be understood by anybody who did not already know what it concerned.

Brother arr. w 20 & 11 pack. Own bread abt 4 wks, said so publicly.

One of the 20 is of the E. people. Kept apart over the cartwright's. Ill feeling inthe yard, put down by the son the first night, held.

Store: not told a figure. Not corrected when I said the winter was dear.

Party sent E to the beck. Back 4th day, no captives.

That was the ordinary business and it took her about four minutes.

Then she stopped, and looked at the paper, and did not write the fifth line.

She sat with the board on her knees for a considerable time.

He has nobody on that hill who will speak hard to him. He said it in this room.One person left and she is twenty years old.

She knew exactly what that line was worth. She had known while he was saying it, sitting on her stool in his too-long cloak, entirely unaware that he was handing her the most useful sentence of the season, and she had gone on sewing and had let him say it.

It was worth more than the brother and the twenty men. It was worth more than the store. A store is a number that changes. A brother with twenty men is a fact anybody in the village would have by Thursday.

A man with no one to check him is a door standing open.

She turned the rushlight down with her fingers and sat in the dark and put the argument to herself properly, because she had learned a long time ago that the way to survive this work is to be honest with yourself about it and dishonest with everybody else, and that people who get the two the wrong way round do not last.

They already know it. Or they will inside a month.

They know the old captain is dead because they arranged it, whatever they sayit was, and any man who can count knows what a new captain in his first winterlooks like. If I do not write it, somebody works it out anyway, and I have gainednothing and risked being the woman whose reports have got thin.

And if I do write it.

She sat with that part.

If I write it, they will tell me to be the second one.

That was the difficulty entire, and she had known it since the moment he said it. They would not tell her to do anything she was not already doing. That was the trap of the last nine weeks and she had walked into it with her eyes entirely open: she had been ordered in October to gain his trust, and she had set about it the way she set about everything, and somewhere in the last three weeks it had stopped being work and she had not noticed the day.

She could not now do less than she was doing without it being visible.

She could not do more without knowing exactly why she was doing it.

And the man in the lane in four hours would read four lines and want to know why there was no fifth, because he was not a fool and had been taking her reports for nine weeks and knew the shape of them.

Venessa lit the rushlight again.

She wrote the fifth line.

He is alone in it. No one there speaks plainly to him now. He knows it and it isat him.

She read it back once, and it was accurate, and every word of it was true, and she had never once written a line that made her feel like this.

Then she folded the paper small, three times, and sealed it with a drop of plain wax and no mark, and put on her cloak and went out.

The night was hard and clear and there was a moon two days off full, which was the worst possible light for it and which was also why the meetings were on the eleventh, because the eleventh was arranged around other considerations entirely and nobody had ever asked her opinion.

She went up the lane and out along the lower street with her basket over her arm.

A woman alone at that hour is a question. A woman alone at that hour with a basket is a woman going to sit with somebody sick, and in a village in January there is always somebody sick, and nobody in Valmarch had asked her about it once in nine weeks.

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She met two people on the lower street.

The first was a man she did not know coming out of the alley by the cooper's, who said good night to her and went on. The second was Berta, at her own door, banking a fire at an hour when Berta ought to have been asleep, and Venessa stopped and said the little that had to be said.

"You're out late, love."

"Ylsa's mother. She's had a bad chest since the turn and I said I'd look in."

"Aye, she has." Berta straightened up. "You're good to. Mind the bank path, it's glass under that new fall and I went over on it Tuesday."

"I will."

"And Venessa."

She stopped.

"He's been down that lane again," said Berta, comfortably, and went inside.

Venessa stood in the street for about two seconds and then went on.

The path up the chapel bank had been trodden all winter and was ice under a skin of new snow, and Berta had been right about it.

She went up slowly, in the moonlight, past the leaning stones of six generations. The chapel was below her on the slope, dark, with its crooked steeple and its verdigris bell, and beyond it the whole valley lay out white and blue and entirely still, and up on the rise the castle stood black with two lights burning in it.

She could see the wall from up there. She could see the scaffolding along the top of it with the snow on every board, and a man walking the rampart with a lantern, and she stood a moment and watched him go the length of it and turn.

The three new ones stood at the top of the bank on the high side where the ground looks down at the water.

They had been set in November and the earth round them had not settled and had heaved twice in the frost, and there was a gap at the base of the third where the ground had pulled away from the stone about the width of two fingers.

She knelt at the second one.

That was the arrangement and it was a good arrangement and it had not been her idea. You kneel at the second and you have both hands at the base of the third without ever appearing to reach for it, and if anybody comes up that path you are a woman at a grave, and there is not a soul in this country who will come and stand over you.

She got the paper into the gap and pressed it back with two fingers and worked a little of the loose earth over it.

Then she stayed where she was.

That was also the arrangement, or it had been at first. You wait. If a person came up the path you did not want to be seen leaving too quickly.

She was not waiting for that.

She had been kneeling at that particular stone for nine weeks, twice a month, and she had not once in the first four visits read the name on it, because she could not have read it in the dark and had not thought about it in daylight.

She had asked Berta in December.

She had asked in the way one asks about a village one has come to late, in the middle of about six other questions, and Berta had told her the three of them without being asked twice: the man who left a wife and two girls in the lower lane, the quiet one with a sister at Osterwald, and the boy of nineteen out of the wheelwright's yard.

The second one was the quiet one. The one with nothing under the stone and a sister who had been told in a letter she could not read, in a doorway, by a neighbour.

Venessa knelt in front of it in the snow with her hands in her lap and her breath going up white, and thought about what she had just put into the ground eighteen inches away from him.

This is where they put me.

They did not choose it to be cruel. That is the part people never believe. Theychose it because a woman kneeling here is invisible, and it is invisible becausethese three are the only graves in this county that everybody in the village hasagreed to leave alone.

And that is why it works. It works because of what people feel about it.

She had done worse. She wanted to be clear with herself about that, kneeling there, because it would have been very easy and very comfortable to decide that this was the worst of it and to feel something noble about it.

She had done a great deal worse, in eleven years, and had slept afterward.

But I did not know any of them.

She got up eventually, because the cold was coming through her skirts and because a woman who kneels too long in a graveyard in January is a woman somebody remembers.

She went back down the path, and near the bottom of it she stopped and looked back up at the three stones standing against the sky.

A hundred and sixty-six of barley.

She had that number. She had got it in the second week of December from a kitchen girl who had it from a man who carried for Rothgar, and it had been a hundred and ninety then, and she had done the subtraction herself and had written it down and sent it.

She had not written it tonight, because she had not been told it tonight, and because he had not corrected her, and because there is a difference between a number a woman has gone and got and a number a man has given her.

And I did not put it in because I did not have it, and not because I would nothave.

She was fairly sure that was true.

She went down.

The fortnight man came at some point before the light. She never saw him and had never seen him and did not want to, and would not have been able to describe him to anybody, and had made a point of that from the beginning.

She was back in her room by the third hour and lay down in her clothes and did not sleep.

In the morning she got up and put the fire in and went out and bought bread, and the woman at the ovens told her about the knight's brother and about the Khesari in the yard and about how there had nearly been trouble in the barracks the first night, and Venessa said the appropriate things and looked appropriately interested and went home.

She sat down at the table with four seams waiting on it and did not touch any of them.

He will read the fifth line, and he will send an instruction, and the instructionwill be exactly what I would send in his place.

And I will do it, because I always do it, and because the alternative is aconversation I have not survived in eleven years.

And the difficulty is not that I do not want to do it.

She looked at the table for a while.

The difficulty is that I have been doing it for three weeks without being told to,and enjoying it, and I did not notice, and now I am going to be given an orderfor something I was doing anyway, and I will never afterward be able to tellwhich part of it was mine.

She picked up the first seam.

Outside, on the hill, the horn went for the change of the watch, and Venessa put the needle in and did not look up.