He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Loft Stair

He takes her through the station and the ledger; at the shop loft stair, his hand beside her head, she breaks the first near-miss with 'You will have to ask twice, Mr Garriock.'

"It's a poor hour to read another person's book," I said.

I sat up in the bed with the cover held to my chin.

Erlend did not move from the doorway.

"I read nothing," he said. "I saw the page was open."

"And my name on it?"

"Your hand. I know your hand. It's in every line of that ledger."

His eyes came up from the table to my face and then went, very fast, to the wall.

"The lamp in the passage went out," he said. "I came to see if you had the fire. There's a gale coming."

"You don't sleep."

"No."

It was not an answer to anything I had said.

He stood there a moment longer in his coat, with the lantern light under his chin, and I saw how tired he was.

It was a great tiredness, the kind that has been carried so long it has gone into the bones.

"Shut the door," I said.

"Yes."

He did, softly, from the outside, and I heard him go along the passage to the stairs.

I lay awake until the window turned grey.

At nine he had me in the counting house, a cold square room above the curing sheds that smelled of salt and lamp oil.

The Isbister ledger sat on a slanted desk, with the leather case beside it.

"This is the book," he said. "I want it read."

"Read?"

"Every account. Every name. What each family owes, and since when, and what they have bought on it."

He stood by the window with his back to me.

"Torvald will sit with you. He has the bank's papers."

"I don't need Torvald," I said.

"I do," he said.

I looked at the back of his coat.

"You've bought two hundred debts and you haven't read one," I said.

"I know the one I wanted."

"Then why buy the rest?" I asked.

"So you couldn't give them away," he said.

It was a cold thing to say, and it was also the first honest one he had said to me.

I sat at the desk and opened the book.

It was my own handwriting I turned through, ten years of it, and Hallgerd's before mine, and before hers my grandfather's cramped slope.

I knew the pages as I knew the stairs of the loft.

Page four was the Wick fishermen, and page nine a family of eleven at the south end.

Page forty was a widow with a boat share and a bad hip.

Three winters ago I had written her debt down by four pounds for work she never did, and logged it in my own black book.

I did not turn to that page now.

Torvald came in at ten with a pot of tea and the bank's papers, and he was charming about all of it.

He had a way of reading a figure aloud as though he were sharing a secret.

He sat across from me and tapped a long white finger on the margin.

"You keep a fine hand, Miss Isbister. It's a pleasure to see a book kept so honestly."

"Thank you," I said.

"Only a gap here, in the numbering," Torvald said. "Page two hundred and eleven, and then two hundred and thirteen."

He tilted his head.

"Where's the middle one?"

I felt Erlend go still by the window.

"Spoiled," I said. "By damp, years ago. My father took it out. He was ashamed of the stain."

"Spoiled." Torvald smiled. "And what did it hold?"

"I couldn't tell you. I was a girl."

"Of course you were."

He poured the tea.

I had the strange feeling that he had asked me for a reason, and that the reason was not the page.

At noon Erlend took me down to the station himself.

It was a place built out of salt and weather: long sheds of tarred wood, a stone pier, a drying beach under a grey sky.

Sixty women in the season, he told me, gutting at the troughs.

Nine boats.

A cooperage where a man with forearms like cables was setting a barrel hoop.

The men took their caps off to him as he walked down the line, and none of them looked at his gloves.

None of them stood closer than six feet.

He had walked among them for fourteen years, and I understood that they had been taught.

"Why do they keep so far?" I asked.

"I pay them to," Erlend said.

"That's not an answer," I said.

"It's the only one I'll give you."

We came up from the beach by the shore path, and he stopped where the wind came hard around the shed and put his hand out to hold a gate for me.

It was a courtesy.

It was an ordinary movement, and his arm stayed rigid in the air, as though the gate were a wall.

I went through without touching the post.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded.

We went on to the shop, because I had to fetch my father's winter coat.

The shop was as I'd left it, but quiet.

My father was at his chair by the stove with his cap over his eyes.

He did not rise.

"I'll only be a moment," I said.

He lifted his cap a half inch.

"Is he using you?"

"He's keeping me. It's not the same."

"It's the same," my father said, and put the cap back down.

I went up the loft stair, with Erlend behind me.

The stair was narrow, with a low lintel at the top.

My room was at the end, under the slates, and I found the coat on its peg and a drawer of my mother's old wool stockings that I took too.

When I turned, he was on the top step.

I had to pass him to go down.

The stair was a yard wide, and he filled it.

I stopped.

He stood, a step below me, so that his eyes were nearly level with mine.

I put my back to the lintel, and the wood was cold through my dress.

His hand came up and flattened on the beam beside my head.

It did not touch me.

It stopped an inch from my hair, and I could feel the warmth of his palm through the leather.

I looked at the glove.

I looked at his mouth.

He was breathing slowly, with great care.

He looked at me for as long as it would take to say a prayer, and in his face was something I would not have called hatred.

His eyes dropped to my lips.

My heart was beating in my throat, and the whole stair seemed to lean.

"Miss Isbister," he said, very low.

I wanted him to touch me.

That was the plain truth, and it shocked me.

I wanted that gloved hand to come the last inch, and I wanted to know what it would do.

I said, as lightly as I could manage, "You'll have to ask twice, Mr Garriock."

He went white.

He took his hand off the beam.

For a moment I thought I had hurt him.

Then I saw the corner of his mouth, once, and it was not a smile, and I knew I had struck exactly the place I'd aimed at.

"Go down," he said.

I went down.

At the bottom of the stair, the shop was empty except for the old clerk, standing at her desk with her spectacles in her hand.

Torvald had come in behind us from the road, and he stood in the door with his hat off, smiling at the counter.

"A good day's work," he said.

Hallgerd Jamieson looked at him across the length of the shop.

She did not raise her voice.

"Take your coat out of my shop," she said.

Torvald laughed, as at a joke.

He did not go.

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