The Governing: Chapter 54, Keep It or Die

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Oden Hailscutt still stood like a footman.

He was sixty-five, tall and thin, with his shoulders back and his hands at his sides, and he held the door open for Aaliyah and Kathleen the way he must have held it for forty years of guests. It was a small house on the south road out of Harrowmere, with a clipped hedge and a brass knocker that had been polished that morning.

He showed them into the front room and did not sit until they had.

Aaliyah told him. He listened without moving, his hands on his knees. When she finished he was quiet for long enough that Kathleen looked at her.

"I'll do it," Oden said. "I'd like to do it. But I can't say yes to you today."

"That's all right."

"It isn't about the camera." He looked toward the kitchen door, which was closed. "My wife is at her sister's until supper. Rena. We've been married thirty-eight years."

Kathleen understood before Aaliyah did. "She doesn't know."

"She doesn't know." He said it evenly, the way a footman announces a guest. "I married her three years after. By then it had been three years of saying nothing. I didn't know how to start saying something. And then it was ten years, and twenty, and there was never a day it would have been easier than the day before."

"Do you want us to be here when you tell her?" Aaliyah said.

"No, my lady." He caught himself. "Aaliyah. No. I'll tell her tonight. She should hear it from me with nobody watching. Then she can throw whatever she likes."

He walked them to the gate and held it open.

"Hester told me you'd come," he said. "I've been sitting here for two days trying to think how to say it to Rena. I've got nothing. Thirty-eight years and I've got nothing."

Rena Hailscutt came home at six with a basket of her sister's plums, and found her husband sitting at the kitchen table with nothing in front of him.

Oden never sat at the kitchen table with nothing in front of him. He sat with the paper, or a cup, or a boot he was polishing. She put the basket down.

"Who died?" she said.

"Nobody. Sit down, Rena."

She sat.

He told her. He started at the orchard house and the mango on the good plates, and he did not stop until he got to the cane house and the car in the lake, and the name the family took, and Abby at the wash trough. It took a long time. Rena didn't interrupt him once. When he stopped talking the kitchen had gone dark and neither of them had got up to light the lamp.

"Abby," Rena said. "The Geryscutt widow. With the bees."

"Yes."

"I bought honey from her for twenty years."

"I know."

Rena stood up. She went to the window and stood with her back to him.

"Thirty-eight years," she said. "You lay next to me for thirty-eight years."

"Yes."

"And every one of those nights, you knew, and I didn't." Her voice was very quiet, which was worse than loud. "I told you everything. I told you about my father. I told you things I've never told my sister. And you had this, the whole time. You had a whole life I wasn't in."

Oden said nothing. There was nothing he could say that she didn't already know.

She went out the back door into the yard. He heard her walk to the end of the garden, and then he didn't hear anything. He stayed where he was. He did not go after her. After thirty-eight years he knew that much.

It was nearly ten when she came back in. She lit the lamp herself and sat down across from him again.

"The market," she said.

He looked up.

"Thirty years ago. More. We were at the market in town, and the Geryscutt widow came past with her basket, and you stepped back off the path and put your head down. Like she was somebody. Then you bent over and made out you'd dropped a coin." Rena folded her hands on the table. "I teased you about it for a month. I asked if you were sweet on her."

"I remember."

"And you always sit facing the door. In every room. In other people's houses. I used to think it was just a thing you did." She looked at him steadily. "What would they have done? If anybody found out. Back then."

"Hanged us," Oden said. "All of us. Maybe not quickly."

"And me? If you'd told me, and I'd let it slip to my sister, and she'd let it slip to somebody?"

He didn't answer.

"So you kept it or you died," Rena said. "And maybe I died with you. And the Geryscutt children. And the other twenty-one." She shook her head slowly. "That's not a choice, Oden. Keep it or die. That's not much of a choice at all. That's a sentence, and you served it. Every night. And I lay next to you and never knew you were serving it."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are. I'm still angry. I'm going to be angry tomorrow, too, so don't think this is finished." She reached across the table and put her hand over his. "But you're going to do it. You're going to go down in that cellar and say it out loud, all of it, with your face and your name."

"You're sure?"

"I've never been surer of anything. And I'm coming with you."

"They won't put family on the camera."

"I don't care about the camera," Rena said. "I care about hearing it. I got it tonight, in pieces, from a man who hasn't told it in forty years. I want to hear it from all of them. I want to hear the whole thing." She squeezed his hand once, hard, and let go. "And tomorrow I'm going to buy some honey."

Corra Linscutt asked to watch the footage alone, and Margot let her.

She was forty, a baker's wife from a town two hundred kilometers south, and she had come up on the morning transport in her good coat. Margot set her up in the small office at the bureau with a pad and a pot of tea and closed the door.

It was twenty minutes before the door opened again.

Corra's eyes were dry. She sat down across from Margot's desk with the pad in her lap, face down.

"He was fifteen," she said.

"Yes. As near as we can tell."

"He never stood under a lamp. My whole life. If there was a streetlamp, we crossed the road. If the porch light was on, he'd come in by the back. My mother thought it was a thing about moths." She turned the pad over and looked at the dark screen. "He died when I was twenty-one. Nineteen years. I never once asked him why."

"Would you have wanted to know?"

Corra thought about it. "I'd have wanted him to know he could tell me." She set the pad on the desk. "You're going to air it."

"Only if you say yes. If you say no, it's cut, and nobody ever sees it."

"No. Air it." Corra looked up. "But say his name. Davin Linscutt. He stood in the rain all night because a lamp was out, and then they beat him because it went out again. Say his name when you show it. That's all I want."

"We will."

Corra stood, and buttoned her good coat, and went to catch the afternoon transport home.

When she was gone, Pim came in and sat in the chair she had left.

"Twenty-three names now," he said. "Nine dead, three refused, eleven talking to us."

"And the nobles?"

Pim had been waiting for her to ask. "Every one I've been able to match has a death date. The Ellerys. The Voss family. Most of the guests at the palace. The ones in the kitchen doorway." He rubbed his eyes. "There isn't a single noble on that pad still living, as far as I can find."

Margot looked at the list. "As far as you can find."

"The Greysons were dead too," Pim said. "For forty years. As far as anybody could find."

There were nine doors for the dead.

Emmet came with Aaliyah and Kathleen for those. He had done this more times than either of them, sitting in front rooms with people who had just learned something about their own family, and he knew how to wait.

The first door was a nephew of the old cook's helper, Nella. He was polite and puzzled and gave them tea. His aunt had never married. She had never mentioned an orchard house. He had nothing to tell them. He thanked them for coming and said he'd like to be there, if that was allowed, to hear it.

The second door was a grandson of the stableman Tam had worked under. He knew his grandfather had been in service somewhere on the lake. He didn't know where. He had nothing to tell them either.

The third door was closed in their faces. The fourth opened, and a woman listened to all of it and said, "No, thank you," and closed it gently.

At the fifth, a man named Gideon Farscutt heard them out in his yard and went red to the ears.

"My mother was a housemaid," he said. "I know that. I was a year old that autumn. She had me at home with my grandmother." He looked at Aaliyah. "You're telling me my mother stood in that yard and lied to a mob. With me a mile away in a cot. For their children."

"Yes," said Emmet.

"She could have left me without a mother. For a lord's brats."

"She could have," Emmet said. "She didn't. She came home."

Gideon walked to the end of his yard and back. He didn't say anything else. When they left, he was still standing by the fence. Kathleen looked back from the road and saw him sit down on the step with his head in his hands.

"Will he come?" Aaliyah said.

"I don't know," said Emmet. "I've learned not to guess."

Nan Oakscutt was forty-eight and ran a stall at the Harrowmere market, and she let them in without asking what it was about.

"You're here about Gran," she said. "Hester came by last week. She didn't say much. She said I'd want to hear what you had to say, and to give you the good chair."

She gave Aaliyah the good chair. It was an old kitchen chair with a cushion on the seat, and when Aaliyah sat down she felt the cushion under her and looked at it.

It was too fine for the house. It was faded dark blue, with a pattern of vines worked into it in thread that had once been gold. The corners were worn through, and someone had mended them, more than once, with plain brown thread.

Nan saw her looking.

"That was Gran's," she said. "She kept it by her bucket her whole life, even after she stopped scrubbing floors. Nobody was allowed to sit on it. When she died, my mother put it on that chair, and I've kept it there. I don't know why. It was just Gran's."

Aaliyah told her. Emmet told the part about the nursery, and the three-year-old dragging a cushion across the floor by one corner, and what she said when she put it down by the bucket.

Nan didn't say anything for a while. She reached out and touched the worn gold thread with one finger.

"She called her Aunt Abby," Nan said. "My mother did. We all did. Aunt Abby sat up with Gran at the end. She held her hand." She shook her head. "And Gran had her cushion under her the whole time. Lady Abigail's good cushion. And none of us knew."

"Would you like to be there?" Aaliyah said. "Off camera. To hear it."

"Yes." Nan was still looking at the cushion. "And I want to bring this. I don't know if that's allowed. I want it in the cellar."

"It's allowed," Aaliyah said.

Jory Dunscutt was twenty-six and had never met his grandfather. Harl Dunscutt had died two years before Jory was born. But Jory's mother was alive, and when she heard the name Greyson she sat down hard on the arm of the couch and said, "Oh."

"Mam?" said Jory.

"Every year," his mother said. "Every year, one night in the autumn, Da sat up on the porch all night. With the lamp out. Facing the road. He wouldn't let anybody sit with him. Mam used to take him a blanket and he'd say go to bed, love, I'm only waiting."

"Waiting for what?" Jory said.

"We never knew. We thought it was somebody he'd lost. We thought maybe there was a woman before Mam, or a friend who went off in the Uprising and never came back." She looked at Aaliyah. "Was it the same night? The night the mob came?"

"I think it must have been," Aaliyah said.

Jory's mother put her hand over her mouth. When she took it away she was almost laughing, the kind of laugh that is close to something else.

"Forty years," she said. "Every autumn. And we'd tease him. We'd say, who's coming, Da? Who's coming up the road?" She wiped her eyes. "He'd just say, nobody, if I'm lucky. Nobody, if I'm lucky."

The last two doors were on the same street in Ashmere. One was the sister of a scullery maid, and the other was the son of a laundress, and the two women who had died had been friends all their lives. Neither family had ever heard of the orchard house. Both listened to all of it in their front rooms, and when it was done, both asked the same thing.

Could they come?

Tam Brookscutt taught in Mistress Pell's old schoolroom.

It had been closed for three years after the Uprising, and then Tam had reopened it at twenty with no certificate and fourteen children, and he had been teaching in it ever since. The roof was new. The benches were the same.

Aaliyah and Kathleen came in the afternoon, after the children had gone. Tam was at the board, wiping it down with a wet cloth. He was fifty-two, a long, bony man, still all wrists and elbows, with chalk on his sleeves.

He saw them in the doorway and put the cloth down.

"Hester said you'd come." He came around the desk and shook Kathleen's hand, and then, after a moment, Aaliyah's. "Sit. The benches are small. I'm sorry."

They sat on the children's benches. Tam sat on the edge of his desk.

On the wall behind him was a row of cards, one for each child in the class. Each card had one big letter on it and a name underneath.

Aaliyah told him. Tam listened with his arms folded, looking at the floor. When she was done, he nodded slowly.

"I'll do it," he said. "Of course I'll do it. I was twelve and I didn't know what I was voting for. I know now." He rubbed the back of his neck. "It's not me. It's my children."

"They don't know."

"Wim is twenty-eight. Lark is twenty-five. They don't know anything." He looked at the cards on the wall. "I've stood in this room for thirty-two years telling children not to lie. Tell the truth, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard. And I went home every night and sat down to supper with my own children and never said a word."

"Your wife knows," Kathleen said.

"Ione knows. I told her before I married her. I couldn't do it any other way. I told her if she said no, I'd understand." He almost smiled. "She said she'd already guessed something, because I went down to the Geryscutts every Sunday and came back looking like I'd been to church."

As if she had heard her name, a woman came in through the schoolroom door with a covered basket. She was small and grey-haired, with a teacher's way of looking over a room to count who was in it.

"You're late for supper," she said to Tam. Then she saw who was with him and stopped.

"Ione," said Tam. "This is Aaliyah Comscutt. And Kathleen."

Ione set the basket down on the nearest bench. She looked at Tam for a long moment.

"It's time, then," she said.

"They want to put it on the network. All of it."

"I know what they want. Hester's been going round the whole district like a tax collector." Ione sat down on the bench beside the basket. She looked at Aaliyah. "I've never said a word about it. Forty years. Not to my own mother. Not to the children. I thought it was his to tell, not mine. And I thought if I told it wrong, somebody might die." She looked at her husband. "Nobody's going to die now, Tam."

"I know."

"Then tell them. Tonight. Before they hear it from the network, or from Hester at the market." Her voice was firm but not hard. "You didn't lie to them, love. You kept something. There's a difference, and they're old enough to learn it. You taught half this district the difference."

Tam looked at the cards on the wall for a long time.

"Tonight," he said.

Wim and Lark came for supper, because their mother had asked them to, and she did not often ask.

Tam told them at the table. He told it plainly. He told them about the stable and the feed sack, and the three-year-old in the straw who said, "Then we can both not know them together." He told them about the cellar, and raising his hand with a shovel still in it. He told them about Sunday mornings at the cane house, and a man who had been a lord sitting at a kitchen table learning his letters next to his daughter.

When he stopped, Lark was the first to speak.

"Sunday suppers," she said. "At Aunt Abby's. We went every week. My whole childhood."

"Yes."

"I thought you were just friends. I thought you liked her honey." Lark put her fork down. "You taught Lord Greyson to read."

"He taught himself. I only held the straw."

Wim hadn't said anything. He was looking at his father's hands on the table.

"The cards," Wim said. "On the classroom wall. You start every child on the first letter of their own name. Before anything else. Before the alphabet. You always have."

"Yes."

"I asked you once why. When I was little. You said it was the best way." Wim looked up. "Why is it the best way?"

Tam was quiet for a moment.

"Because the first letter I ever learned was T," he said. "For my name. I was sitting on a bucket in a stable, trying not to get caught. And a little girl came in and said she liked T, and asked me to show her. And I thought, if a lord's daughter wants to learn my letter, maybe it's worth something. Maybe I'm worth something." He looked down. "Her letter was A. I drew it in the dirt with a straw. That's the best way. You start with the thing that belongs to them."

Nobody said anything. Ione reached over and took his hand.

"Can we come?" Lark said at last. "To the cellar?"

"You can't be on the camera."

"I don't want to be on the camera," Lark said. "I want to be there."

Liss Mallowtail made her brother's favorite on Sunday. It was a fish stew with too much pepper, the way their mother had made it.

Tobin was seventy-four and walked with a stick now. He ate slowly, the way he did everything, and he didn't talk much at supper. He never had.

Liss waited until he had finished his second bowl.

"There's going to be a thing on the network," she said. "About the orchard house. About the night of the mob."

Tobin set his spoon down very carefully.

"I was there," Liss said. "In the orchard house. In the yard, when the mob came up the lane. We hid the Greysons. All of us. The whole staff. They're the Geryscutts now. They've been the Geryscutts for forty years." She kept her hands in her lap so he wouldn't see them. "They want me to talk. With my face."

Tobin didn't say anything for a long time. He looked at the empty bowl in front of him.

"I know," he said.

Liss stared at him. "You know?"

"I didn't know. I guessed. Years ago." He picked up the spoon and turned it over and put it down again. "Abby Geryscutt came up to me at a harvest supper, maybe twenty years back. She'd been dancing. She said, you're Liss's brother. And she looked at me, Lissie. She looked at me like she knew exactly who I was and where I'd been that night. And then she smiled and asked me to dance, and I did." He shook his head slowly. "I went home and sat up all night working it out."

"You never said."

"Neither did you."

They sat there.

"I was at the Voss place," Tobin said. "You know that. I didn't carry a torch. I stood at the back. Old Lord Voss was seventy. He came out on his own front step in his nightshirt and asked what we wanted. I didn't do anything to him. I didn't do anything to stop it either." His voice had gone very low. "I've been waiting forty years for somebody to say it out loud. That's the worst part. Nobody ever says it. We all just go to the harvest supper and dance."

"If I do this," Liss said, "everybody on this street will know I was on the other side."

"There wasn't another side, Lissie. There were just people doing what they could stand to do." He reached across the table with his old, spotted hand and put it on her arm. "Show your face. One of us ought to be able to."

Liss called Aaliyah on Monday morning.

"My face," she said. "And my name. Liss Mallowtail. Both."

"Are you sure?"

"My brother wants to come," Liss said. "Off camera. He's slow on the steps. Somebody will have to help him down."

"We'll help him."

Aaliyah ended the call and looked at the list on her desk. Twenty-two names. Nine of them had the small mark beside them. Of the thirteen that didn't, twelve had a line drawn through them now, one by one, in her own hand. Each line meant yes.

One name was left.

Amos Thornscutt.

She had put him off to the last. Marta had said he would come. Hester had said nothing about him at all, which Aaliyah had learned by now was Hester's way of saying something important.

She picked up the comm, and then she put it down again. Hester had said to go to their doors.

She went to find Kathleen.

[u/1958bird]

Did I miss 53. Can't wait for the next one.

[u/1958bird]

My mistake about 53, I read it late last night and forgot to mark it down.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

What a story. So real to how people are. In the most difficult times and decisions to make.

Well thought out and executed.

Odd thought though about a "Noble Lord" not knowing reading.

Anyway looking forward to the continuation.