Aurel's Choice

Dabrel packed by sequence and not by urgency, which meant that on the morning of the nineteenth the room above the forge contained one crate of books, a bed stripped to the ticking, and a general sitting on a chair in the middle of the floor with nothing whatever to do.

The bench was the difficulty. There was a scythe blade in the vice with the curl out of it, the chandler’s kettle waiting on a new bottom, a bill-hook that had come up from the far end of the village on Tuesday in the hands of a child who had put it down on the step and run, and two files on their nails that were not his.

Trewin came up the outside stair at eight o’clock.

He had not come up it once in nine weeks. He stood in the doorway, shorter than his own anvil, and looked at the bench and not at the man, and said:

“You’ll leave the files.”

“They are yours.”

“They are. That’s why you’ll leave them.” Trewin looked at the ceiling for a while, which was a thing his face did in place of an expression. “And you’ll come back for them.”

He went down again. That was the whole of it, and Aurel stood at the top of his own stair with the sound of the forge starting below and found that he had to put his hand on the rail.

· · ·Scene break

Warden Ferris came at nine with the certificate in his pocket, which he was due to sign on the twenty-third and which he had written out in advance the way a man writes out a thing he does not intend to be surprised by.

He did not get his hat off.

“She’s demanded the hearing,” Colm said. “Yesterday, four o’clock, into the bag in front of me, and she told me what was in it before I asked, because she’s decided that’s the kind of woman she’s going to be and God help everybody who has to stand near her.”

Aurel put down the file.

“Tell me what she has written.”

“She’s demanded it sit here, in the open, with the village let in. And she’s put in a statement that the proclamation’s false, and that the working broke at six seconds, and that what stopped the last day at Dunmoor was you not coming through a gap, and that she said four words to Marshal Vance at five o’clock on the third day and let her take them for something else.” Colm’s voice was not quite steady. “She’s signed it. Her girl’s witnessed it. It’s gone.”

The forge yard was extremely quiet. Below them the bellows went, and went again.

“There was a letter,” Aurel said. “On the sixteenth, under a councillor’s seal.”

“There was.”

“Then she was offered something for her silence, because that is what a councillor writes on the sixteenth, and she has answered it in this fashion, and she has done it five days before a coach, without knowing what I would do.” He heard his own voice go somewhere he had not authorised. “She has spent the whole of it. The account, the licence, the girl’s four years, the thing this village thinks of her — and she has spent it into a hearing that I will not be at, because I shall be in a cart on the north road by the time it sits.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“She should have written the other letter.”

“Aye, well.” Colm turned his hat over once. “You’d both of you make a lot more sense to me if either of you would do the sensible thing at the same time as the other one.”

· · ·Scene break

Aurel went and stood by the pump for eleven minutes, which was what he had instead of a walk, because a man under a direction may not go up a lane.

He had made his arithmetic on the sixteenth and it had been honest arithmetic. Go quietly, and she keeps the licence; go quietly, and the file closes; go quietly, and nobody is made to pay for him. It had been correct in every particular except one, which was that it had been made by a man who wanted to be told what to do, and he had known that while he was making it, and had let the numbers cover it.

She had gone the other way. She had not gone the other way for him — that was the thing he made himself stand still and look at, out of respect, because to turn it into a gift to himself would be one more way of taking up no room. She had gone that way because she had decided she was done with the tidy version, and she had done it alone, in a shop, with a burnt letter in her stove.

And he was going to get onto a coach, and the hearing would sit with his chair empty, and the only person in the Marchland who could say the light stopped a hundred yards short of the spur and I watched it from four feet would be the woman whose word was on trial.

There was a name for a man who let somebody else make the whole payment and told himself it was humility. He had been that man for eleven years and had grown comfortable in it, and Tamsin Brook had stood on his stair in the spring and taken his monster off him, and there was nothing left to hide behind.

He went up and wrote it out standing at the bench, on the back of a sheet of Dabrel’s inventory, in the small fast hand that had written a great many things it did not enjoy writing.

To the Treaty Office. I am the subject of the direction of the tenth.

I demand a hearing under the article, and I ask that it sit at Hollow Ash, in the open, with the village admitted.

I shall give evidence at it. I shall give the whole of what I did in the ninth, tenth and eleventh years of the war, including the parts that are to nobody’s credit and to mine least of all, and I shall answer any question put to me by either signatory, by the warden, or by any person of this township.

I do not ask to be excused the direction. I ask to be heard before I am removed under it. The article allows it and it has not been done on this border in eleven years.

Aurel Donnacha

“They’ll not stop the coach for that,” Colm said, reading it in the yard.

“No.”

“The direction stands meanwhile. I’m to see you onto it at noon on the twenty-first. That’s the words: the warden to see him onto it.”

“I am aware of the words.”

Colm Ferris stood there for a moment with his hat going over in his hands, once, twice, the way he had done it since he was twelve years old in a street outside a tea-house.

Then he stopped. He leaned past Aurel and put the hat down on the bench, flat, crown up, square to the edge, and left it there.

“I’ll not do it,” he said.

“Warden—“

“I’ve said twice in this village that there’s no may in my part of the article, and I’ve read it again three times this week and there isn’t, and I’ve been hiding behind it since the first of the month like a man behind a wall.” He was speaking quite calmly. “But the coach isn’t in the article. The coach is in a direction made on the papers by four clerks who’ve never stood on that green, and what it says is that the warden is to see him onto it. Seeing a man onto a coach is a thing a man does with his hands. A man can decline, and take what comes.”

“They will have your commission.”

“They will have my commission.” Colm’s jaw set. “I’m the miller’s youngest. I’ll go back to the mill and my brother will be insufferable for a year and then he’ll get used to it. I’ll not put a man in a cart to be tried on paper in a room three hundred miles away when he’s demanded to be heard on the grass he’s accused on, and she’s demanded the same, and both of them have handed me every word of evidence against themselves without my asking for one of it.”

“You are not obliged to be ruined on my account.”

“I’m not being ruined on your account. Don’t flatter yourself, general.” Colm picked his hat up again, and put it on. “I’m doing it because a warden who only enforces the parts that cost him nothing is a warden who never meant any of it, and I’ve had that argument shouted at me across a counter by a woman sifting thirty pounds of tea, and she was right, and she’s about to pay a great deal more for it than I am.”

· · ·Scene break

There was one more thing owing, and it could not be paid in a doorway.

Colm arranged it because Colm arranged everything now: the weighing room at the mill at three o’clock, both parties present, the door standing open, the warden at the table with a pen and paper, and the whole of it recorded as a statement taken in the lawful administration of the township, which is a thing the article permits and which Aurel had decided, at about one in the morning, he was never again going to do any other way.

Hesper came in with her hat on and her hands empty and sat where Colm put her.

Aurel stood, because it was not a thing to be said sitting down, and gave it to her the way he had given her the tent: in order, with the dates, like a report. The nine pages in the winter of the ninth year and to whom they went and to whom they did not. The council, and the reading aloud, which had been vanity as much as anything. The corridor and the men he had appointed. Three hundred and forty-one days in a room eight feet by six.

And then the sixteen pages of the eighth year, with the valleys numbered, the water and the mills, argued for against men who wanted something bloodier, won, and never withdrawn. Crossing Fold on the second day, the nineteenth, fog burning off by ten. The name at the bottom of the order, and where that man was now.

Colm’s pen was the only sound in the room. He wrote it all and did not once look up, which Aurel understood was the only kindness available to him.

When it was done Hesper sat quite still for a while.

“Tamsin,” she said.

“On the twenty-ninth. She came into the yard and asked me a question and I answered it, and she asked me to say nothing to you, and she was owed that.”

“And on the top of the lane, an hour after, I asked you why your face was like that, and you said you’d had a difficult conversation.”

“I said one thing to you in nine weeks that was not true, and it was not that. It was that will be it, about Tamsin going home early on the Wednesday. I have had it in my chest since the moment it left me and I would like it written down as well.” He said it to the warden, evenly. “Put that in, please.”

Colm put it in.

Hesper got up. She came round the corner of the table and stood in front of him, close enough that he could see the leaf dust on her sleeve, which he was not supposed to be near enough to see.

“Nine pages,” she said. “You wrote nine pages that said stop, in the ninth year, and you read them out standing up, and they put you in a room for it, and the whole of my side has spent eleven years calling you the only thing that country ever produced that was worse than its government.”

“Yes.”

“And you were going to get onto a coach on Tuesday and take that with you.”

“I was.”

“Then you’ll do what my apprentice made you promise and what I’m making you promise now, and I’m not asking you kindly.” Her chin was up and her voice was flat and exact. “The whole of it. Out loud. In the open, on that green, in front of the lot of them, at the same time as each other — the nine pages and the sixteen pages and the cell and the man who signed, and no leaving out the part that makes you look like a man who was proud of it, because you were, and they will not believe one word of the rest if you spare yourself that.”

“Mistress Brook required the same,” Aurel said, “and I have begun to suspect she learned it somewhere.”

“Don’t be funny at me. She’s had four years of it and she’s told you she won’t have two.”

· · ·Scene break

Dabrel had the list on the bench when he came back, squared to the edge, and the pencil beside it.

Eight items from the fourteenth of the arrival month, in Dabrel’s square capitals: firewood, water, flour if the mill would sell, boots for the wet, a line for washing, the window, and Eat something, sir. Item nine had been added in the spring and said Hen. Item ten said Return warden’s Article Nine, corner unfolded, and had a tick against it. Item eleven, dated the seventeenth, said Crate the books. Arrange carriage, 21st, noon.

Aurel picked up the pencil and wrote under it, in his own hand, small and upright and very fast:

12. Stay.

Dabrel came in with the last of the straw off the bed on his sleeve and read it upside down, which was a thing he could do and had never once been asked to explain.

“That’s twelve, sir.”

“It is.”

“It’s not an item I can do.”

“No,” Aurel said. “That one is mine.”

Dabrel looked at the list for a moment longer. Then he took the pencil out of his hand, turned it round, and rubbed out the whole of item eleven, and blew the dust off the paper, and put the pencil back.