He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Book Burned
My father came out of the cells in March on forty pounds of surety, and the forty pounds was the Ness's.
They had put it together in a hat, as they had put the names, a shilling at a time from every house between the Wick and the south end.
He came home on the Lerwick boat with his cap in his hands and sat down in his chair by the stove and did not drink for a week.
He was drinking again by April, a little, and ashamed of it.
He had not been tried.
The fiscal wrote that he could not proceed without the one who would swear.
The matter lay in a drawer.
Torvald came and went at Lerwick with his gold chain and his smile.
I carried the bill home from the shop door in the morning and put it on the kitchen table at Voe Head.
I had come back to the Hall in May, by my own choosing, to the room at the end of the passage with the door that did not lock.
The kitchen was warm and bright with the long day, and smelled of bread.
The housekeeper had left a pot on the hob and gone out to the hens.
Erlend came in from the station at noon with fish scales on his sleeves.
He read the bill standing, with it in both hands.
He read it twice.
"He's put it up for the whole shore to see," he said.
"He's put himself up with it," I said.
"He means to sell the page to the highest bidder in front of the Ness."
"To whom?" I asked.
"To me," Erlend said. "He thinks I'll buy it. He thinks I'll stand on a barrel in front of the Lerwick shore and bid for my own family's death, and he'll sit at a table with the gold in front of him and watch."
"Will you?" I said.
"I'd pay every penny I have."
"Then you'll lose it," I said.
"Yes," he said, and his mouth twisted. "I know."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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