Page 31

That afternoon Malo drives into Trevern to meet the Thursday carrier and comes back with two things. For Riwal, a flat parcel under the Morlac market’s seal: the sale register he ordered at the settlement table. For me, a letter in Katell’s handwriting, which is large and uneven and slides downhill across the page. Riwal takes his parcel upstairs. I keep mine.

Nora.

Your man Malo says these go free, so you will have this by Friday.

Corentin is not worse in himself, but he is thinner, and he sleeps most of the day now. The Order has written that the market’s note is good. Their physician has been twice and brought the medicines, though he says much the same as the old one, which is nothing. Do not fret. He eats when I make him.

He is cheerful, which is the strange thing. He says he has had good company in the evenings. He told me on Sunday that you had been by. I did not correct him, because there is no use in it, and he was so pleased that I had not the heart. He said you sat with him and talked about the bells.

Write to him again.

Yours, K.

I read it standing in the hall.

I read it again sitting on the bench.

He told me on Sunday that you had been by.

On Sunday I was here, four miles into the fen, hanging a burned tapestry.

He is confused. Old men go confused, and he is sixty-one and full of physician’s cordial and sleeping fourteen hours a day, and it is the kindest possible explanation and it fits.

I sit on that bench with a letter in my hands, and I’m frightened, and this time I know what of.

He is glad of the visits.

I hear the physician’s note in Corentin’s voice, over and over. I left the paper on Corentin’s table. I did not leave the words.

Who visits him?

Something is killing people in the fen towns. Riwal told me so while I was up a ladder, and again at noon, with the ledger shut on his finger: it is in the towns on the road to Corentin. He could tell me in a minute whether this is that.

I cannot show him. If I put this letter in front of him, the fen is the reason I never get to that house. He will say it is exactly what he was afraid of, and he will be right, and the door that shut at noon will not open again.

And if I go anyway, I walk out of his house for good, the market sends his money back, and the physicians stop coming.

So I do what I can without him. I write to Katell. Who has been sitting with him in the evenings? Tell me who. It cannot go before Monday. I give Malo one of my own forty-nine coins to send it.

At supper I do not talk.

I do not do it to punish him. I sit down with my bread and my eel and I have nothing in me, and the letter is in my apron, and that whole enormous stone hall goes silent.

It goes on.

Riwal puts his knife down. “What has happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Enora.”

“A letter from home. He’s the same. He’s fine.” My voice comes out ordinary. “Katell writes like a landslide. It takes three goes to get any sense out of one of hers.”

He is watching me as closely as he did on the first night, from the doorway, while I walked the length of this hall listening to it.

“You have not said anything since you sat down,” he says.

“Haven’t I?”