He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The Light Night
The Hall had a washhouse at the back with a copper and a deep stone tub.
Erlend filled it himself with water he carried from the burn in two buckets.
He did it without being asked, in the white light of one in the morning, barefoot, with his sleeves rolled.
The fair's smoke was still in his hair.
I sat on an upturned barrel in my shift and watched him.
The sheriff had kept us until dusk.
There had been papers, and a long, careful account in a clerk's hand of what the whole shore had seen.
My father had been led away to his sister's lodging in Lerwick with Hallgerd on his arm.
Torvald was in the cells.
He would be tried at the autumn sitting, and it would be a hanging matter.
Erlend had sat very still on a bench in the court house passage when the fiscal told him so, and said nothing at all.
We had come home across the Sound in the dark with the cooper at the sheet.
Erlend had not spoken the whole way.
Now he poured the last bucket in, and the steam rose, and he straightened with his hand on his back.
"It's hot," he said. "I wasn't sure of the copper."
"You've not asked me to get in."
"I'm telling you it's hot."
I laughed.
I stood and took off my shift and stepped into the tub, and sank down to my shoulders with a long sound of pleasure.
He stood by the wall with the empty bucket.
He was looking at me, and his face was open.
"Come in," I said.
"The tub's for one."
"It's a deep one. Come in, Erlend."
He put the bucket down.
He took off his shirt, and his trousers, and stepped in at the other end, and the water came up and slopped over the edge on the flags.
We sat facing each other with our knees drawn up and the steam between us.
The light came in through the little window, white and endless.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
My body ached.
The fair had taken the whole day out of me, and the ten years before it.
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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