He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Store at Closing
A tall man in a wet oilskin lays the bank's ledger on the counter, names a twenty-year-old debt and three dead, and takes Danika's labour for a year and a day; she writes her own name under the line and says she will keep her own book.
I was writing the day's last entry when the shop door opened and let the November rain in.
"Four pounds of tea, to the fisherman's wife at the Wick, on the book," I said aloud, because that was how I wrote it.
The pen stopped on the word "book."
A tall man stood in the doorway in a wet oilskin, with the sheriff's officer at his back.
He wore leather gloves, though he was indoors.
A leather case hung from his hand, and rain ran off his hat brim onto my father's floor.
Behind him a second man in a good tweed coat smiled at the shop as if it were a dinner he had been looking forward to.
I knew them both by sight.
The tall one was Erlend Garriock, who owned the biggest curing station on this coast, nine boats and sixty hands in the season.
The smiling one was his older brother, who managed all of it.
No Garriock had ever set foot in the Isbister store.
"Closing," my father said from his chair by the stove.
He did not get up.
He had been drinking since noon, and he looked at the case in Erlend's hand the way a man looks at a dog he has been told is mad.
Erlend crossed the floor.
He set the case on my counter, over the page I was writing on, and the lamp shook.
"I have bought your ledger," he said.
His voice was low and level and carried to the back of the shop.
"I bought it from the bank at Lerwick this morning, every page and every name in it."
Two men by the meal barrels went quiet.
"The store's debt to the bank is mine now," he said. "So is whatever each crofter on this Ness owes to the store."
A woman with a child on her hip had been waiting for her tea, and she stepped back.
"That's not so," I said.
"The bank agent will tell you so tomorrow." He turned his head. "Torvald."
His brother stepped forward, the one with the smile.
"Page one of the transfer," Torvald said easily, and unfolded a paper. "Page four, the Wick accounts. Page nine. Pages two hundred and eleven, and two hundred and thirteen."
He read the numbers out like a man reading hymns.
Behind us, at her high desk in the corner, old Hallgerd Jamieson put down her pen.
She had kept the Isbister book for fifty years.
I saw her face go the colour of tallow, and she looked at nothing.
Torvald did not look at her at all.
"Twenty years ago this January," Erlend said, "a man named Isbister wrote in this book that the Garriock croft above the Wick owed eleven pounds."
My father said nothing.
"Eleven pounds, and costs. On the ninth of January the croft was taken and the family put out of it into a gale."
He said it without raising his voice.
"My father, my mother and my sister were found dead on the hill by the burn."
Nobody in the shop made a sound.
"I was fifteen, and I was not dead," he said. "They took me to Leith for what was left of the debt, and I did not come home for four years."
I had heard the story of the Garriock croft as a child, the way you hear a story about a flood.
I had never heard that anyone was left alive to tell it.
"The law lets a creditor take a debtor's labour in place of money," Erlend said. "I hold every debt in this book now, so I may take what I like."
He turned and looked at me for the first time.
His eyes were pale blue and very cold, and there was nothing in them I could have argued with.
"I'll take Miss Isbister."
"What?" my father said.
"You're her surety, Mr Isbister. She signed it herself three years ago, at twenty-one, on page one, in her own hand."
He touched the leather case.
"She'll come to my house for a year and a day and keep my books. While she does, no debt in this ledger is called, not yours and not one crofter's."
"And the day she leaves?" I said.
"They fall due, every one."
I put my pen down.
I had signed my father's page on my twenty-first birthday because he asked me to.
I had never once thought the book could be used on a person.
Erlend laid his gloved hand flat on the counter, a few inches from mine.
"Stand back, Miss Isbister," he said. "You've ink on your hand."
I had.
I stepped back from the counter, and my hand went out on its own and touched his glove.
I meant only to push the case aside.
He jerked away from me as if I had struck him.
His whole body went hard, and the colour left his face.
He put the hand behind his back and held it there.
He did not say a word.
Nobody in the shop saw it but me.
I knew what I had seen, and I did not understand it.
"The officer will witness it," Erlend said. His voice had not changed. "I'd have it written tonight."
My father put both hands on the arms of his chair.
"Danika," he said. "Don't."
It was the first thing he had said to me in a week that was not a complaint.
He did not stand, and he did not look at the man who was taking his daughter.
He looked at the floor.
I looked at the woman with the child on her hip.
Her husband owed my father six pounds four shillings for meal, nets and a winter of tea.
She looked back at me with a face I had seen at my counter for ten years, a face that had never asked me for anything but time.
If I said no, her husband's name was on page four.
Two hundred names were in that ledger, and I had written most of them.
I had never once written a debt I did not first try to find some way to forgive.
I walked to my father's chair.
I took the pen out of his hand, a good steel pen with a bone handle, still warm from his fingers.
He let me have it.
I went back to the counter and found the line at the foot of Erlend's paper where the officer was pointing.
I wrote Danika Isbister in my own hand, and the date under it.
The ink was wet, and I blew on it.
"Then I'll go to your house tonight," I said, so that the officer and the shop and the woman with the child could hear me. "But I will keep my own book there."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend