He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Black Book

"You said you would not ask to see it," I said.

I stood on the bottom stair in his shirt with my bare feet on the cold stone.

"I said I would not ask."

Erlend did not take his hand from the notebook.

"I did not ask," he said. "It was lying open on your table when I went in at four, and I read the first page."

"You went into my room," I said.

"The door was open. You'd left it open."

"I'd left it open for you," I said.

His face went dark.

He turned the notebook over and read from it aloud, in a flat voice, the way a clerk reads a charge.

"The widow with the boat share. Four pounds, written down, 1881. Winter meal for a fisherman's children at the Wick, eight shillings, my wages. A boat share at the south end, wrote off 1882, my wages."

He looked up.

"You write down your father's debts and call it forgiveness," he said.

"I write them down so they stay written," I said.

"Your father wrote them up. You wrote them down. It's the same pen."

"It is not," I said.

"The Wick account stands at six pounds four. It has not come down by a penny in the ledger," he said. "If you had forgiven it, it would show."

"It would show to my father!" I said. "I couldn't write it off in the book. He'd have seen. I wrote it in mine, and I paid the shop from my own wages, three guineas a year, and the book said the debt stood."

"Then it's a lie in the ledger."

"It's a lie that fed eleven children."

He put the notebook down on the hall table, carefully, as though it were a thing that might be taken from him.

"I don't believe it," he said.

I felt my face change.

"You don't believe it," I said.

"I've a book of two hundred names that an Isbister kept for ten years, and a page in a woman's hand saying she was kind. You'll forgive me if I want to see a receipt."

"I paid the people your father's station starved!"

I had not meant to say it.

It came out hard, and rang in the stairwell.

His head came up.

"Yes," I said. "Your station. The Ness men sell their fish to you at your price, and they buy their meal from us at ours, and the two prices meet at the foot of every crofter's account. I've kept the book for ten years, Mr Garriock. Do you think I don't know what it does?"

"You kept it."

"I kept it!" I said. "I kept it because the alternative was somebody who wouldn't. I did the best that could be done inside a thing that was already wrong!"

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