Cecily found it a week after the funeral, when she finally made herself clear the back room.
It was in the drawer of the washstand, under a folded shift and a bundle of cloth strips that had been boiled so many times they had gone soft as paper. Three sheets, folded twice, tied with a bit of the same cloth. On the outside, in Aldith's heavy upright hand, which had been learned late and in Cecily's own schoolroom and had never become graceful: For the Codex. Not to be read at the burying. C. to bring it up the hill.
Cecily stood with it in her hand for some time. Then she put it inside her bodice, finished stripping the bed, scrubbed the floor, which did not need it, and brought it up the hill after dark.
They read it at the kitchen table, the three of them, with the children asleep and a single candle and the door shut. Cecily had not opened it. She put it down in front of Victoria and sat back with her arms folded, and Victoria untied it and read it aloud, because Cecily nodded at her to, and because there was nobody else who could have done it without their voice going.
The first sheet was midwifery. It was a list, numbered, in no order that Thomas could find, of things Aldith had evidently decided were too obvious to have written down before and had realised, late, that nobody else would know.
Boil the cloths. I have said this a thousand times and I am writing it here so that someone can say it after me a thousand more.
Do not let a man stay in the room who is going to faint. It wastes a pair of hands getting him out.
If a woman tells you something is wrong and you can find nothing wrong, keep looking. She is right more often than you are.
If the grandmother is in the room, she will tell you what to do. Thank her. Do not do it.
There were nearly thirty of them. Some made Cecily laugh, once, sharply, as if it had been surprised out of her. Some made her look at the table. One of them — about a child that would not breathe, and what Aldith had done with her own mouth and a cold cloth and a count under her breath — Victoria read twice, slowly, so that Thomas could write it down separately, and Cecily watched him write it with an expression he did not look at directly.
The second sheet was shorter.
To whoever sits on that council when this is read. You built a fever house and called it mine. It was not mine. It was the town's and I ran it. When I am dead do not name anything after me, I will not be there to be embarrassed and I would rather the money went on cloth. You will want to. Do not.
Thomas glanced at Victoria. There had been a proposal, three days earlier, put by Diccon, to call the new ward the Aldith Ward. It had passed without objection.
"Well," Victoria said, "that's that undone."
The third sheet was addressed by name.
Thomas. You came into this valley not knowing how to hold a child and you still do not, I have watched you with the last one and it is a wonder he has a neck. I have no other complaint of you. You listened to me in the first fever and you did not have to. Most men with your kind of name in a place do not listen to old women. I noticed it. That is all.
Victoria. You know what I think of you, I told you to your face and I will not write it twice.
Cecily. She will want to do all of it. The school and this house and the tallies and the lying-ins and the teaching of the girls. Let her try for one season. Then take something off her whether she likes it or not. Do not ask her. She will say no. Take it.
That was the end. There was no signature. There was a blot at the bottom where the pen had rested too long, as if Aldith had sat there deciding whether to add anything, and decided not.
Nobody spoke for a little while. The candle was low.
Then Cecily said, in a very level voice, "She wrote that about me."
"She wrote it for the Codex," Thomas said.
"She wrote it to you. About me. To be read out at your table after she was dead, so that I couldn't argue with her." Cecily's hands had come unfolded. "Take something off her whether she likes it or not. Do not ask her. She knew I'd see it. She knew I'd be sitting right here."
"She said not at the burying," Victoria said. "She didn't say not in front of you."
"Don't." Cecily turned on her. "Don't do the precise thing. Not tonight." She stood up, and the bench scraped. "I did everything she asked. Every single thing for twenty years, and she sat with me through her last month and never said one word of this to my face, and wrote it to you instead."
"She sent for me," Victoria said. "Near the end. She asked me if you'd manage."
Cecily went still.
"What did you tell her?"
"The truth. That you'd try to do all of it and refuse every offer of help and do it badly for most of a year." Victoria did not look away. "And that after that you'd be better at it than she was."
The room was very quiet.
"She laughed," Victoria added. "It made her cough."
Cecily stood there a moment longer. Then she picked up her cloak from the peg, and put it on, slowly, and went to the door.
"You're both right," she said, with her hand on the latch, not turning round. "That's what I can't stand. She was right and you were right, and I'm going to do it all anyway, and you're going to have to take something off me, and I'm going to hate you for it." A pause. "Give it a season. She said a season."
She went out. They heard her boots go down the lane, quick and hard, and then not at all.
Thomas sat looking at the three sheets.
"She's right, and so is Aldith," Victoria said. "It's going to be an awful winter."
"Where does it go?"
"With the others." She meant the back quire of the Codex, the one nobody had ever named, that held Wat's letter and Elias's page and her own unfinished one. "The first sheet goes in the medical section as well. Copied. Cecily should copy it. She'll want to and she won't admit it."
Thomas picked up the third sheet and read his paragraph again by the last of the candle. It is a wonder he has a neck.
He found that he was laughing, very quietly, and that it was not quite laughing, and that Victoria had put her hand flat on the table near his without touching it, and left it there until he was done.