He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Hall at Voe Head

She signs the bond in his house, takes a room with a key on the outside, and finds him in her doorway at three in the morning looking at her black notebook.

The bond took the officer an hour to write out fair, at my own counter, with my own father's ink.

I read every line of it twice.

A year and a day, in Erlend Garriock's house, keeping his books.

No debt in the Isbister ledger to be called while I stayed.

Every debt in it to fall due the day I left.

At the bottom was a line I had not heard him say aloud.

It said I might keep a book of my own in his house, for my own use, and he would not ask to see it.

"You put that in," I said.

"You asked for it," Erlend said.

"In front of a shop, in a temper."

"A bond is a bond." His eyes did not leave the paper. "It costs me nothing."

I packed a canvas bag.

I took two dresses, my winter shawl, my good boots, and the little black notebook from under my mattress, the one nobody knew about.

Hallgerd was waiting at the foot of the loft stair with her shawl over her head.

She was seventy years old and came up to my shoulder, and I had never seen her hands shake.

"Mind the ink," she said.

It was what she always said when I left the shop.

"Hallgerd, what is it?"

"Nothing, lass. Go on."

She looked past me at the door, where Torvald Garriock was holding it open for me with a bow.

She turned and went back to her desk.

We went out to the pony trap in the rain.

My father did not come to the door.

Voe Head was an hour along the shore road in the dark, with the sea loud on the left and Erlend driving.

He did not speak, and I did not either.

Torvald sat on the bench behind us and hummed a dance tune I knew from weddings.

When the lights of the Hall showed above the curing beach, he leaned forward.

"You'll like the house, Miss Isbister," he said. "Erlend has all the lamps lit. It's the only extravagance he allows himself."

"Torvald," Erlend said.

"I'm only saying she'll be comfortable."

The Hall was a long grey merchant's house with a slate roof and a stone pier below it.

Beyond the pier stood the curing sheds, the barrel stacks black in the rain.

A housekeeper took my bag at the door and said nothing.

She had the eyes of a woman who had learned long ago that her master did not like to be looked at.

The room she showed me was at the end of the upstairs passage.

It had a bed with a white cover, a table, a fire laid, and a window over the bay.

The door had a key on the outside.

I put my hand on the inside of it and found only a plain iron plate.

"It locks from the passage," I said.

Erlend stood a good way off in the doorway.

"It locks from the passage and opens the same," he said. "There's no key on my door either."

He did not look at me.

"I don't lock any door in this house, and I won't have one locked against me. You may shut it. You may not bar it."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I have been locked in enough rooms," he said.

He said it flatly, to the wall, and went on before I could answer.

"Supper is at eight."

Supper was at a long table in a room with a fire at each end.

There were three places.

Torvald sat at the head, in the chair that should have been his brother's, and he carved the mutton himself.

He talked.

He talked about the herring, and the price of salt, and a dance at Lerwick, and a minister who could not preach without sneezing.

He was good at it.

I felt myself half laugh twice before I stopped.

He called his brother "Erlend," and nobody else in my hearing had called him anything but "Mr Garriock."

Erlend ate very little.

He kept his gloves on at the table and cut his meat with one hand.

The other hand stayed in his lap.

"I'd see the croft, if I may," I said, over the pudding. "The old Garriock croft above the Wick."

Torvald's spoon stopped.

"If I'm to answer for my father's book," I said, "I'd like to know the place I'm answering for."

"There's nothing to see," Torvald said. "The walls are down. A few stones and some sheep dung."

"Have you been there lately?"

"I've no stomach for it." He smiled. "It's not a pleasant ground for those of us who had a family in it."

Erlend looked at his brother, and then at his plate.

"I'll take you," he said. "Not tomorrow."

I did not press it.

I put down my spoon and looked at the man across the table, with his gloved hands, his grey-touched hair and his hard tired face.

I thought: he has hated my father for twenty years.

I thought: he has had twenty years to work out how.

And I thought, which I had not expected, that I would very much like to know what his house was like at night.

When I went up, Torvald was on the landing.

He had the room at the head of the stairs, the largest, with its door standing open and a fire going.

"Good night, Miss Isbister," he said. "The Isbister lass. We'll look after you."

"I can look after myself."

"I'm sure of it."

I shut my door and did not bar it, because I could not.

I laid the black notebook on the table and opened it to a clean page.

I wrote the date, and under it, in my smallest hand: What he wants.

I wrote: To make Father watch.

I wrote: How far will he go?

Then, because I was tired and twenty-four and there was no one in the world to read it, I wrote: He does not like to be touched. Why?

I went to bed with the lamp lit.

I woke in the dark with the lamp out and the fire low.

A lantern stood on the floor of the passage, and my door was open.

Erlend Garriock was in the doorway.

He was dressed, with his coat on and his gloves in his hand.

He was not looking at me.

He was looking at the table, where the black notebook lay open in the last of the firelight, at the page I had written.

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