Chapter 16 · Chapter 16

The paper reached me on the fourth day, and it reached me third-hand, which is how such papers always arrive.

A clerk of the chancery had a cousin who sold cordwain in the Zacatín. The cousin had a wife.

The wife had a tongue, and by the time the thing came to our door it had lost its seal and its shape both, and what remained was the sense of it: an accusation, unsigned, laid before the archiepiscopal court, naming a woman of the Albaicín who prepared remedies and set them down in writing, and asking whether such writing was physic or something else entire.

Nothing in it was true in the way a court understands truth. Nothing in it was false in a way that could be answered. That is the whole craft of the anonymous: it names a shape and lets the magistrate fit a body to it.

I heard it in the courtyard, with my sleeves rolled past the elbow and my hands full of bitter bark, and I did not drop the bark. Maryama's pestle went still, one stroke, then took up again. That was the household's answer before any of us had spoken: nothing had changed in the mortar.

Hasan came at the hour of the second meal and stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands and his jaw set, and said what brothers say, that he would find the man. I told him there was no man.

There was a hand, and the hand had a grievance, and the grievance was not against my character but against my book — that I had written down what grew in the hills and what it cured and in what measure, and that a woman who keeps such a ledger keeps a kind of property, and property invites theft by way of the court.

He looked at the shelf where the herbals stood, and then at the floor beneath it, and neither of us said the word manuscripts aloud. In that house we did not say it. It lived under the north foundation like a second cistern, and cisterns are found by the men who dig, not by the men who are told.

At dusk Saad came in from the shop with the last of the light behind him, and he did not ask me what had happened. He had already been told, in the street, by someone who wanted to watch his face while he heard it. He set his keys on the chest by the door, unhurried, and asked whether the accusation carried my name or only the quarter's.

"The quarter's," I said. "A woman of the Albaicín."

"Then it is not yet a case. It is a rumor with a seal."

He went out again before the gate was shut, and I did not ask where. What he did that night I learned later and in pieces: the notary's house, then the house of the elder who keeps the parish accounts, then a third door. He did not argue the accusation. He never argues an accusation; it gives the thing a floor to stand on.

He offered instead a fact that could be checked — the years I had supplied the sisters of the hospital, the ledger with the receipts in it, my hand known and my measures witnessed — and he let each man repeat the fact back to him so the repeating would do the work in the morning.

The name of the house was spoken in three rooms before it was spoken in the square. That is the order, and it holds only if it is kept in that order.

When he came back the lamp was low and I had not slept. He closed the inner door behind him — the whole of it, the latch dropping — and only then did he take my hand, and turn it over, and look at the stains the bark had left in the seams of my fingers.

"They will ask what is in the book," he said.

"They may ask. It is in Latin and in Arabic and in my own hand between them, and there is nothing in it that a physician would not read aloud in the plaza."

"Then we make it impossible to call it anonymous."

That was all. He took the lamp and left me the dark and the idea.

So I did not burn a page. I sat on the lowest stone step with the book on my knees and I numbered it to the end, and beneath each number I wrote the day and the place and my own name in full, and where a recipe had come from another hand I named that hand too, and where it was mine alone I said so without softening it. It took until the watch called the third hour. My wrist ached to the bone.

Let them come now and call it a hidden thing. A hidden thing does not carry a date on every leaf, and a signature on every date, and a copy of the whole delivered by my brother's own hand to the notary before the morning bell.

Five houses had been named in that register by the time the accusation arrived. The fifth was ours. I closed the book, and I counted once more, and I did not arrive at a different number.