Against The World

Chapter 92: The House Above the Road

The morning after Evelyn’s birthday, I found a piece of orange peel beside the correspondence.

I looked at Mary.

“Is this part of the report?”

“No.”

“Then why is it here?”

“Her Majesty said you might need encouragement.”

I ate it.

Mary placed a map over the empty dish.

“The surveyor has answered.”

That seemed a little unfair.

The northern healing house had changed names three times.

The road beneath it had changed twice.

The stream, which I had assumed would be the most reliable part of the map, had been diverted to serve a mill.

Mary placed the old survey beside the new one.

I turned my head.

Then turned the paper.

“There.”

She nodded.

A narrow rise above a bend in the road. An old boundary wall. A spring marked with a small circle.

On the older map, someone had written House of the Open Hand.

On the newer one, it was simply Hill House.

“Is anything left?” I asked.

“The surveyor says it’s occupied.”

“By whom?”

“He wasn’t certain. He measured the neighboring pasture.”

I looked up.

“He didn’t ask?”

“He was measuring the neighboring pasture.”

Apparently other people could encounter a possible remnant of my great-grandmother’s kingdom and continue with their afternoon.

I admired this without understanding it.

Mary drew a finger along the road.

“Less than two hours from the Stoneford gate in good conditions. Sister Maelin knows someone who has delivered linen there.”

“Delivered linen?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the little circle marking the spring.

Perhaps we had been looking for a ruin too confidently.

Evelyn was painting when I went upstairs.

Only a small study of the cup beside her elbow.

She looked up as I entered.

“Have you found it?”

“We think so.”

“Are you going?”

“If the road is clear.”

She rinsed her brush.

“Bring back a drawing.”

“Of the house?”

“And the doorway, if the carving survives.”

“You remember who you’re asking?”

“I remember. Mary can label the parts I won’t recognize.”

I leaned down to kiss her.

She caught my sleeve.

“And find out who lives there before you arrive with half the guard and frighten them.”

“Eliza has already said something similar.”

“Good.”

Beside the hearth, Helena was holding Carol while Garrick slept in his cradle.

I looked toward them.

Evelyn followed my glance.

“We’ll be here when you return.”

“I know.”

“Before supper?”

“That’s the plan. I’ll send word through Stoneford if it changes.”

She let go of my sleeve.

Then picked up her brush again.

By the time I reached the door, she was frowning at the painted handle of her cup.

I left her to it.

We rode out from Stoneford the following morning.

Mary came with the copied maps wrapped against the weather. Maelin carried her usual bag. Eleanor brought a measuring cord and a short iron tool that she assured me was for examining stonework.

Alistair looked at it.

“Usually when you say that, someone loses a wall.”

“Only the loose parts.”

Melody rode ahead with two guards.

The road climbed gradually between winter fields. Patches of old snow remained beneath the hedges, and the horses’ breath drifted white when we slowed.

Maelin pointed to a low ridge.

“Beyond that.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Once, years ago. I brought bedding with another sister.”

“Did you know what the place had been?”

“No.”

She drew her cloak closer.

“I remember thinking the doorway was unusually fine for such a poor house.”

We reached it shortly before noon.

There was still a doorway.

There was also smoke rising from a chimney, washing stiffening on a line, and a woman trying to persuade a goat out of the kitchen.

The goat saw us first.

This did not improve the woman’s opinion of him.

“Move.”

He moved toward the door.

“The other way.”

Melody dismounted.

“Would you like help?”

“If you can convince him that my turnips aren’t his.”

A few moments later, the goat was outside and Melody was holding a length of rope.

The woman wiped her hands on her apron.

Then she noticed the rest of us.

Her gaze stopped at my coat.

Moved to the Crown mark.

Returned to my face.

“Oh.”

I dismounted.

“Good morning.”

She looked past me at the guards.

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing here, I hope. We’ve come to ask about the house.”

Her expression closed a little.

“Which part?”

“The old part.”

“That would be most of it.”

Maelin stepped forward.

The woman recognized her after a moment.

“You came with Sister Bereth.”

“I did.”

“The blue blankets.”

“Yes.”

“We still have two.”

She looked at me again.

Then at Eleanor’s tool.

“You’d better come inside.”

The house smelled of broth, drying wool, and the faint sharpness of herbs.

Three beds stood along one wall. A fourth occupied a little recess near the hearth. Someone had placed a vase of bare red twigs on the windowsill.

An old man sat in a chair with a blanket around his knees, carefully peeling an apple.

He watched us enter.

“Tax men?”

“No,” the woman said.

“Good. There’s nothing worth taking except the goat.”

From outside, Melody said, “I’m beginning to understand why.”

The woman’s name was Hester Fen.

Her husband had kept the house with her until his death six winters earlier. Now her niece came most days, a neighbor brought firewood when he could, and travelers sometimes left a few coins.

“We take people who can’t manage the road,” she explained. “Those with no one near enough to fetch them. Sometimes an illness only needs a warm room and someone remembering the kettle.”

Maelin put down her bag.

“May I speak with your patients?”

Hester nodded.

Then looked at me.

“We haven’t a charter.”

“I haven’t asked for one.”

“People usually do before explaining why something must stop.”

I took off my gloves.

“Then I should explain why we’re here.”

Mary laid the old map on the table.

Hester leaned over it.

Her finger found the spring immediately.

“That’s right.”

Then the wall.

“That corner fell before my husband was born.”

Mary showed her the copied drawing of the rose above the open doorway.

Hester looked toward the entrance.

For a while, she said nothing.

Then she pulled out a chair and sat.

“My mother-in-law called it the rose house.”

“Did she know why?” I asked.

“She said her mother did.”

“Did they worship Aurelia?”

At the name, the old man stopped peeling his apple.

Hester’s hands remained folded on the table.

“I don’t know what they believed in private.”

“And you?”

“I believe in keeping the chimney clear and having clean sheets when a fever comes.”

Maelin glanced over from beside one of the beds.

Hester looked at her, then back at me.

“If you mean to make everyone pray before they can stay here, you’ll have to find someone else to run it.”

“No.”

She waited.

I pulled out the other chair.

“No one will have to pray.”

“Even to your goddess?”

“Even to her.”

The old man resumed peeling.

Hester studied my face.

Then she reached into her apron pocket for a ring of keys.

“There’s something you should see.”

She took us into a narrow storeroom behind the kitchen.

Shelves held folded linen, jars, two chipped basins, and a quantity of objects that had evidently been too useful to throw away for several generations.

Hester moved a sack of dried peas.

Behind it stood a shallow wooden chest.

“My husband’s mother kept the old papers in here. I’ve added ours.”

Mary knelt beside it.

The first pages concerned ordinary things.

Roof repairs.

A delivery of lamp oil.

Money owed to a cooper.

A woman named Bessa who had left three blankets and asked that nobody sell them.

Beneath those lay older books wrapped in linen.

Mary opened one carefully.

The handwriting changed halfway down a page.

Then again several pages later.

“Successive keepers,” she said.

Hester nodded.

“That’s what I thought.”

There were admissions, discharges, deaths.

Sometimes a full name.

Sometimes only a description.

Young carter. Left hand injured. Brother sent for.

Woman from the western road. Does not wish her husband informed.

Child found beside the bridge. Answers to Linn.

I read that last entry twice.

A different hand had added a note below it.

Mother arrived on the fifth day. Both departed together.

I let out a breath I had not noticed holding.

Mary turned another page.

Near the front, beneath a patched cover, she found the original dedication.

The ink had faded brown.

But the name remained.

Aurelia.

There was no great flash of light.

The room remained cramped.

Someone in the kitchen dropped a spoon.

Mary read the dedication aloud, slowly enough to make sense of the older phrasing.

The house had been endowed for the care of travelers, the sick, and those unable to earn their lodging.

A small field had supplied vegetables.

Two rents had paid for linen and fuel.

The spring belonged to the house.

Hester leaned closer.

“Two rents?”

Mary checked the next page.

“One from a mill store. One from an orchard holding.”

“We haven’t received either.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Thirty-one years.”

Mary looked up at me.

I nodded.

“We’ll find out what happened to them.”

Hester’s mouth tightened.

“If someone’s family has been farming that orchard all their lives—”

“We’ll find out first,” I said.

She relaxed a little.

Then Mary reached the final line of the dedication.

“The keeper shall record what care was given. Those received need give no account of their worthiness.”

Behind us, Maelin lowered her eyes.

Hester rubbed one finger over a worn patch on the chest lid.

“My mother-in-law used to say something like that.”

“What?”

“Beds weren’t prizes.”

While Mary worked through the books, Eleanor inspected the building.

I followed her into the yard.

She examined the spring channel, the base of the wall, and a patch of roof where newer tiles sat unevenly among the old ones.

“Can it stay occupied?” I asked.

“Most of it.”

“And the rest?”

“That back room needs emptying until the beam is supported.”

I looked toward the window.

There were jars on the sill.

“Storage.”

“For now.”

She tapped the stone beside the doorway.

“This is sound.”

I brushed away a little moss.

The carving above us had been damaged, but not entirely lost.

A curve that might have been a petal.

The edge of an open hand.

Someone had filled the deepest cuts with mortar long ago.

“Can you uncover it?”

“Yes. Carefully.”

I looked back through the door.

Hester was helping Maelin move a patient’s chair nearer the fire.

“Ask her first.”

Eleanor glanced at me.

Then nodded.

We ate broth at the kitchen table.

Hester apologized for the bowls.

Maelin told her the broth was good.

Melody returned from securing the goat and accepted her portion with unusual seriousness.

“He has opinions about knots,” she said.

“He has opinions about everything,” Hester replied.

The old man by the fire raised his bowl.

“Good taste in turnips.”

Hester ignored him.

We talked about the people who came to the house.

Most stayed only a few days. Some needed longer. She had turned three away since the cold weather began because there had been nowhere to put them.

That troubled her more than the damaged roof.

“I can put another bed in the storeroom once it’s safe,” she said.

Eleanor shook her head.

“You need the storage.”

“Then where?”

I looked toward the yard.

There was room.

There would be a cost.

There would also need to be someone besides Hester who knew where the clean sheets were kept and when the kettle had last boiled.

“Would your niece want paid work?” I asked.

“She already wants paid work. I haven’t been able to offer it.”

“Then let’s begin there.”

Hester set down her spoon.

“What would you expect in return?”

“The house to keep doing what it does.”

“And the name?”

I looked toward the old doorway.

“I’d like people to know its history.”

She considered that.

“I won’t turn it into a place where sick people are brought out to impress visitors.”

“Neither will I.”

After a moment, she nodded.

“You can mend the rose.”

We left after arranging the first delivery of timber and linen.

Maelin remained behind for the afternoon. One of the guards would escort her back to Stoneford, where she had a bed waiting at her own hospice.

Mary had permission to borrow two of the oldest books for copying.

She wrapped them herself.

Before I mounted, Hester came to the door.

“Your Majesty.”

I turned.

“Will there be trouble because you came?”

I thought of Veyr’s letters.

The broken staff at Reed Crossing.

A name that could still frighten people who had never known the woman it belonged to.

“There may be questions,” I said. “If anyone threatens you, send word through Stoneford. Eliza will leave the details.”

Hester nodded.

Then she looked down at the threshold.

“My husband spent twenty years trying to find where the draught came from.”

“Did he succeed?”

“No.”

Eleanor spoke from behind me.

“I did.”

For the first time since we had arrived, Hester laughed without looking surprised by it.

I reached our rooms before supper.

Evelyn looked up from the book in her lap.

“Well?”

“It’s still a healing house.”

She closed the book.

I told her about Hester.

The goat.

The old records.

The child whose mother had come back.

At that, her hand settled on the side of Carol’s cradle.

“And the drawing?” she asked.

I took it from inside my coat.

She unfolded it.

There was a pause.

“Is this the doorway?”

“Yes.”

“And this?”

“A window.”

“Ah.”

“Mary has written underneath.”

“So she has.”

She smiled, then studied the page more carefully.

“You can still see the hand.”

“Eleanor thinks she can uncover the rest.”

I sat beside her.

For a while, we looked at my poor drawing together.

“I thought we were going to find something that had ended,” I said.

Evelyn shook her head.

“Someone kept washing the sheets.”

I thought of the books in Mary’s keeping.

Different hands.

Different names for the house.

The same spring running through the yard.

“Yes.”

Our son woke and made a small sound from his cradle.

I went to lift him.

Evelyn spread the drawing flat on the table and reached for a pencil.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping your window.”

“That seems kind.”

“It appears to need care.”

I sat down with Garrick against my chest while she began.

After a little while, the house on the page looked like somewhere a person might arrive cold and tired.

Somewhere they would be allowed inside.

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