Chương 187: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SEVEN: BERTRAND'S LETTER

The letter from Prior Bertrand arrived in the last week of November, addressed to Okafor by name and title. She read it in the study with Marcus present because she had asked him to be. To the Senior Medical Officer of the Warden's March. I reserved before the court at Vellenmoor the right to inspect the review structure to which the woman Mirra — whose name I now know is Okonkwo, and I shall use it — was released. I write to exercise it. I would come in the second month.

I am aware this is your worst season and I have chosen it deliberately. An inspection conducted in a quiet month tells the inspector what a place looks like when it is not under pressure, which is the least useful thing to know about it. I would wish to see a review conducted, not a review described. I would wish to see one where a practitioner is found to have erred. If you have none such in the second month I shall assume either extraordinary fortune or an unusual definition of error.

I write also on a separate matter which is not an inspection and to which you owe no response. I read your two documents to the court perhaps thirty times. The second — your assessment of her — contained a sentence which I have not been able to leave alone. You wrote that you practised alone for eleven months in your first year and that you know what it costs. I am seventy-one years old. I have been prior in this township for thirty-three years and before that I was a priest in two others.

I have not, in fifty years, worked alongside another man of my own standing. There is one prior to a priory. My superiors visit twice a year and inspect. My juniors defer. I have made every decision of consequence in this house alone for thirty-three years and I have had no colleague to say to me: Bertrand, you are wrong about this. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

I did not know this was a thing that could be otherwise until I read your account of a room in which practitioners examine one another's failures aloud, quarterly, by rule, with the errors written down under their own names. I have been thinking since August about what my thirty-three years would look like if such a room had existed for me. I do not ask you to answer this.

I set it down because it seemed to me dishonest to inspect your establishment for the accountability of others while concealing that the concept had struck me as personally indicting. In faith, Bertrand, Prior at Vellenmoor. Okafor set the letter down. Neither of them said anything for a while.

"He's asking for something," Marcus said eventually.

"He is not," Okafor said.

"That's what makes it what it is. He explicitly is not." She picked up the letter again.

"A seventy-one-year-old man who has held unreviewed authority for thirty-three years read a document about peer review and recognised himself as the danger it describes, and then wrote it down and sent it to a stranger." She paused.

"That is a harder thing than anything that happened in that courtroom."

"What do you write back?"

"That he is welcome in the second month," Okafor said.

"That I will arrange for him to see a review in which someone is found to have erred, and that I will not need to arrange it, because in the second month someone always has." She paused.

"And nothing about the second part."

"Nothing?"

"He said he did not ask for a response," Okafor said.

"A man like that does not say that as a courtesy. He says it because he needs it to be true." She folded the letter carefully.

"I will answer the second part in the second month by letting him sit in the room. That is the only answer that isn't presumptuous." She stood.

"Marcus," she said.

"When he comes. He should meet Denise."

"Will she want to?"

"No," Okafor said.

"I'll ask her anyway. She can say no and I'll accept it." She paused.

"But he's the man who stood up in a public room and told his own township that his fees have priced them out of healing for thirty-three years, and she is the woman who treated them for free because of it, and they have never spoken. I think they should each know what the other is."