Chapter 64: The Woman Who Never Fills a Silence

He had discovered that about her in a tavern in Auenstadt in the autumn and had not entirely believed it until it happened again. She did not fill a silence. Most people filled a silence, and most of the ones who did not were doing it deliberately and could be felt doing it, and she simply worked and let the room be quiet.

"You'll want to know what it costs," she said eventually.

"I'd assumed you'd tell me."

"It costs nothing, and you will argue about that for a while and then you will lose, so we may as well have it now." She did not look up. "You got a bolt of linen carried three hundred miles on a barony cart in the autumn and I have never paid you for it."

"That was a cart that was coming anyway."

"And this is a seam I am sewing anyway, because I have four of them on that table and none of them is going anywhere tonight." She bit the thread. "There. Now we have both said our piece and neither of us has won, and I am going to go on sewing it."

Osric let it go, because there was no version of that argument he was going to come out of well.

"How's the winter treating you?"

"It is treating me exactly as it treats a woman with no land, which is to say it is expensive." She said it without any self-pity whatever. "Wood is dear. Wood is very dear. I bought a cartload in October at a price I was pleased with and have since discovered I was robbed, and I have been rationing it since Rhumnacht was a month off and will go on rationing it."

"Who sold it you?"

"I am not going to tell you that."

"Why not?"

"Because you are the captain and you would go and speak to him, and he would give me the wood back and hate me for it, and I would have to live in this lane with him for the rest of my life." She looked up at last. "I would rather be cold and left alone. That is not pride. That is a woman who has moved villages before and has learned what it costs to be the person the captain took an interest in."

That landed somewhere Osric had not expected.

"You've moved before."

"Twice." She went back to the seam. "Once because there was no work and once because there was a man, and neither of them is a story worth an evening, and I will tell you both of them eventually and you will be disappointed."

"I'd not be disappointed."

"You would. Everybody is." Her mouth moved slightly. "People want a woman on her own to have a reason. A dead husband, or a fortune lost, or something with a villain in it. And the truth is generally that the work dried up and there was a fellow who would not take an answer, and a person got on a cart."

Osric turned that over.

"And Valmarch?"

"Valmarch has a wall going up and a garrison in it and eleven weddings a year, and I can mend and I can cut and there is nobody else in this village who can do the second." She shrugged. "And it is a long way from anywhere. I liked that particularly."

She worked for a while.

"You have been coming down this lane," she said.

Osric did not answer that immediately.

"I've been walking in the evenings."

"You have been walking in the evenings past a lane with nine houses in it that does not go anywhere." She still did not look up. "It comes out at the dairy wall and stops. You cannot be walking through it, Captain, because there is no through."

"Ah."

"Berta has mentioned it to me four times." Now she did look up, and there was something in her face that was not quite amusement. "Not unkindly. Berta does not do anything unkindly. But four times, and the fourth time she said that she supposed a man who has lost a friend goes where his feet take him, and I said I supposed so too, and then we both stood there being extremely tactful at each other for about a minute."

Osric found that he had nothing at all to say.

"I am not asking you for an account of it," she said. "I want that understood. You may walk down any lane in this village at any hour and it is nobody's business, and if you would rather I had not mentioned it I shall not mention it again."

"No."

"No what?"

"No, I'd rather you mentioned it." He turned the words over as they came out and found he meant them. "Everybody in that castle has stopped mentioning things to me. Nine weeks of it. There's not a man on that hill who will say a hard sentence to my face any more, and I did not notice it happening and I noticed it about a fortnight ago all at once."

"Because you are the captain."

"Because I'm the captain."

"Yes." She said it as though it were obvious and had been obvious to her for some while. "And you did that to somebody else for twenty years, presumably, and thought nothing of it."

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Osric looked at her.

"That's exact."

"It is not clever. It is only what happens." She turned the cloak. "My father was a foundry man with eleven under him. The day they made him master of the floor, three men he had drunk with for nine years stopped calling him by his name, and he came home and sat in the chair and could not work out what had gone wrong with the world. And nothing had gone wrong with the world. He had simply become the man who decides who works Saturday."

"What did he do about it?"

"Nothing. There is nothing to do about it." She smoothed the seam flat. "He found two people who would go on saying hard sentences to him and he kept them, and one of them was my mother and the other was a man he had known since he was nine, and that was his entire arrangement and it did him for twenty years."

"Two people."

"Two is enough. Two is a great deal more than most men in that position get." She bit the thread and started a new length. "You have your daughter."

"I have my daughter."

"And?"

Osric thought about it.

"That's it," he said. "That's the count."

She did not say anything to that, and did not look up, and went on sewing, and Osric sat on a stool in a small warm room and understood that he had just been asked a question and had answered it and that neither of them was going to say another word about it.

She finished it at about the ninth hour.

She shook the cloak out and looked at the seam from both sides and was not entirely satisfied, and said so, and explained why in about nine words that Osric did not follow.

"It'll do."

"It will do because I have made it do and not because it is right, and that is a different sentence and I would thank you to know the difference." She handed it over. "There. Keep it off nails."

"I've kept it off nails for thirty years."

"You have kept a serjeant's cloak off nails for thirty years. That one is two inches longer and you have not learned the new length yet, and you will go on catching it for about another year." She said it entirely matter-of-factly. "That is not a criticism of you. It is a fact about cloaks."

Osric stood there with it over his arm.

"Thank you."

"You may thank me by bringing me the next one before it has been rained on."

He got the door open and the cold came in and took all the warmth out of that room in about a second and a half, and he stood in it with his hand on the latch.

"Mistress."

"Venessa."

"Venessa." He said it and found it was the first time. "I'll likely walk down this lane again."

There was a pause of perhaps two seconds.

"It does not go anywhere," she said. "But you would be welcome to."

He went back up the hill in the dark with the cloak over his arm and the cold going through him and did not put it on until he was through the gate.

And he stopped at the top of the track, as he had stopped there every evening for nine weeks, and looked east over the wall at the country lying white and open under the stars.

Two people.

That is what she said and that is what it is, and I have got one, and she istwenty years old and she has her own life to be getting on with and I am notgoing to make her carry it.

He was the other one. For twenty-two years he was the other one and I neveronce put it to myself in those words, and I have been walking down a lane in thedark for a fortnight without knowing why.

He put the cloak on.

It was still too long in the body.

Down in the lane behind him the light went out of the fourth shutter on the right, some while after it needed to, and Venessa sat in the dark on the edge of the bed for a considerable time before she moved.

She had done the seam well. She had done it as well as she could do anything, and it had taken her two hours for a job that should have taken one, and she had known she was doing that at about the halfway point and had gone on doing it.

She had also, at about the same halfway point, stopped working out what she was going to write down.

That was the part that would not sit still.

She had been at this eleven years and she had a method and the method was not complicated. You are pleasant. You are useful. You let the man talk, because men in that position always talk eventually, and you keep four or five facts in your head as they arrive and you put them in order afterward in the quiet.

Tonight she had got about three sentences into it and had lost the order, and had gone back to the seam, and had not found the order again all evening.

She could reconstruct it if she wanted to. She sat in the dark and did it, deliberately, the way a person presses on a tooth.

The store. He did not say a figure and he would not, but he did not correct mewhen I said the winter was expensive, and a man who is comfortable correctsyou.

The knight's brother is in the castle with twenty men and he has brought hisown bread. That is worth two lines by itself.

He has not one friend on that hill who will speak hard to him. Not one. He saidit out loud, in this room, sitting on that stool.

She stopped there.

That last one was the valuable one. It was the most valuable single sentence anybody had given her in nine weeks and she had it exactly, in his own words, and the man in the lane in eleven days would know precisely what to do with it.

He has one person left and she is twenty years old.

And a man in that condition will take a second one from wherever it is offered,and will not examine it closely, and will be grateful.

Venessa sat in the dark for a while longer.

Then she got up, and went to the shelf, and put her hand on the small worn wooden token without picking it up, and stood there with two fingers resting on it.

Eleven days until the fortnight man.

She would have something for him. She always had something for him.

She had not, until that evening, minded very much what it was.

The man came on the eleventh night, as he had come on the eleventh night for nine weeks, and Venessa was awake for two hours before she needed to be.

That was new and she did not like it.

She had never in eleven years lost sleep over a delivery. She had lost sleep over a good many other parts of it, over the first year of it particularly, and had come out the far side of that into something she thought of privately as the working state, in which a person does the work and sleeps afterward because the work is finished and there is nothing to be gained by lying awake.

She lay awake.

At about the second hour she got up and dressed in the dark and did the last of it, which was the writing.