Aldith died that autumn, when the herb beds outside her window had gone to seed and nobody had the heart to cut them back.
It was not sudden. She had been failing all summer, in the way of a woman who had spent the better part of fifty years paying out exactly as much of herself as each day asked for, and had finally, at sixty-eight, run the account down. In the last fortnight she slept most of the day. When she was awake she was herself, sharp and short and impatient with everyone, and then she would close her eyes in the middle of a sentence and be gone again, and Cecily would sit with the end of the sentence in the air and wait to see whether it came back.
Cecily did not leave the room. She had stopped going up to the schoolhouse altogether; Osbern was taking the older scholars, badly, and the fever house ran on the girls Aldith had trained and on notes Cecily wrote at the bedside and sent out by whoever passed the door. She ate what was brought to her. She slept in the chair. When Victoria came down the lane in the last week with a basket, Cecily took the basket at the door and thanked her and did not let her in, and Victoria, who had been refused before and knew what it cost to refuse, went home without arguing.
The instruction came two days before the end, in one of the clear stretches.
Aldith woke in the late afternoon and lay looking at the ceiling for a while, and then said, without turning her head, "Have you got your book?"
Cecily had her book. She always had her book.
"Write this down. Word for word. I'll know if you tidy it."
Cecily dipped the pen.
"Do not make it a large funeral," Aldith said. "Wat had a large funeral and it was insufferable and I told him so at the time."
Cecily wrote it. Then she looked up.
"You can't stop them coming."
"I can tell them not to."
"You've delivered half the valley. You've sat up with the other half. They'll come whatever I do. They'll stand in the lane if there isn't room."
"Then let them stand in the lane." Aldith shut her eyes. "It'll do them good. Most of them have never stood still for an hour in their lives. And you read that out, at the start, before the priest gets going. Exactly as I said it."
"They'll laugh."
"Good," said Aldith, and something moved at the corner of her mouth. "Better than the other thing. I've heard enough of the other thing to last me."
She slept again. She woke once more that night, briefly, and asked whether the cloths had been boiled, and was told they had, and said that was all right, then. She did not say anything else that anyone could swear to afterward.
She died a little before dawn on the second day after, with Cecily holding her hand and nobody else in the room.
Cecily did not call anyone. She sat for a while. Then she got up and did the things that needed doing, in the order Aldith had taught her to do them for other people's dead — the window opened, the eyes closed, the jaw bound, the hands laid straight — and when that was finished she went out to the copper in the yard and lit the fire under it and boiled the cloths, all of them, every cloth in the fever house, because it was the morning and that was what you did in the morning. She was standing over the steam with her sleeves rolled to the elbow when the first of the girls came in and saw her face and understood.
Thomas heard at the tally-bench, an hour later, from Joan, who had run up the lane and was trying not to cry in front of the clerks and not quite managing it.
He went down. He did not go in. He stood in the yard of the fever house beside Cecily and the copper, and she did not look at him, and after a while she said, "Don't say anything. I'll fall apart if anyone's kind to me before noon."
He did not say anything. He took the paddle from her and stirred the cloths, badly, until she took it back.
They made it a small funeral. Cecily saw to that, and fought Diccon over it, who wanted the school children walking in procession behind the bier and the bell rung the whole way from the fever house to the churchyard.
"She said not large."
"She's owed large. She's owed the biggest this valley's ever—"
"She's owed what she asked for," said Cecily, "and she asked for small, and I wrote it down, and if you put a single child in a procession I'll walk her down the lane myself on a handcart."
Diccon did not put any children in a procession.
About four hundred people came anyway.
They filled the churchyard and stood three deep along the wall and out into the lane beyond, as Cecily had said they would, in a thin cold drizzle that nobody seemed to mind. There were women there that Thomas had never seen before, from farms up the north road and villages over the ridge, who had walked since before light because Aldith had once sat up three nights with a child of theirs or a sister or themselves. There were men who had stood outside a door while she worked and been told to go and make themselves useful elsewhere. There were girls she had trained, and the girls those girls had trained.
Hamo said the words. He was very old now and his voice did not carry, and he kept them short, which Thomas suspected had also been arranged.
Before he began, Cecily stepped forward, with her book open, and read the instruction aloud, exactly as it had been given.
"Do not make it a large funeral. Wat had a large funeral and it was insufferable and I told him so at the time."
There was a pause. Then the laugh went through the crowd from the front to the back — startled, unwilling, impossible to stop — and out into the lane, where people who had not heard the words heard the laugh and laughed too without knowing why. It went on for some time. Somebody near the wall was laughing and crying at once and could not seem to stop either.
Thomas, standing at the edge with Victoria and the children, thought that this had been the point. That the old woman had known exactly how many would come, and that she could not stop them, and had spent her last clear afternoon arranging the one thing she could — that the sound four hundred people made over her grave would not be weeping.
Cecily closed the book. Her face did not change at all. Only Thomas, who was watching for it, saw her hand shake once on the cover and go still.
Victoria wrote the page that night.
She sat up at her table long after the house was asleep, and Thomas, waking at some hour and finding her side of the bed cold, came down and found her there with a dozen spoiled sheets around her, all of them covered in her small upright hand and all of them crossed out.
"It's too long," she said, without looking up. "Every time. I keep finding things that are true and I can't leave them out."
"She said three lines."
"I know what she said. I argued her up from two." Victoria pushed the sheets away. "Do you know how hard it is to put that woman in three lines? She walked into dying villages the first winter of the fever with nothing but a bag and a bad temper. She pulled Edmund out of me. She held my blood in with her own two hands. She told me I was making a fuss." Her voice did not break. It simply stopped, for a moment, and then went on. "And she told me not to make a meal of it. And she told me not to blur useful into comforting. And I keep blurring it."
Thomas sat down across from her and did not say anything, which he had learned was sometimes the most useful thing he could do in that room.
She burned the spoiled sheets in the grate, one at a time. Then she took a clean one and wrote for a long while without stopping, and blotted it, and turned it round so he could read.
Aldith, midwife, of the fever house. Went into stricken villages on purpose, repeatedly, when nobody made her. Taught everyone who asked and several who did not. Could not be thanked and would leave the room if you tried.
"Three," Victoria said. "Not a word over."
Underneath, in smaller letters, she had begun a fourth line and struck it through. He could still read it under the stroke. She was right about most things and unbearable about approximately none of them, which is rarer.
"You crossed it out."
"She'd have haunted me." Victoria looked at the struck line for a while. "It's the truest thing on the page. That's why it has to go."
The page went into the memorial ledger the next morning, three lines long, with nothing under them.
Thomas copied the fourth line that night into the quire he kept in his drawer, among the things the children said, where nobody would ever look for it and nobody would ever be haunted. He thought Aldith would have called that cheating. He thought she would also have let it stand.