He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Curing Shed
The shed was colder that night than it had been, and he had no lamp lit.
I found him by the sound of his breathing.
He was sitting on a salt bench at the back with his gloves off and his elbows on his knees.
It had been three days since the barrel yard, and in those three days he had come to my door every night and stood in the passage, and gone away again.
He had not touched me.
He was waiting to be told, as he had promised.
I had not told him.
I had been angry, and I had not wanted to be.
"You came," he said, without looking up.
"You left the door open," I said.
"I always leave it open," he said.
"Then you've been waiting for somebody for a long time," I said.
I sat on the bench beside him, an arm's length off, and the cold of the salt came through my skirts.
"I want to say a thing," I said, "and I want you to hear all of it before you answer."
"Say it."
"You came into my shop with your man at your shoulder and a paper in your hand, and you counted what was owed. Twenty years, eleven pounds, and three of your people dead on a hill. You counted every penny and every grave, and you never once asked what I'd paid."
He lifted his head.
"I've kept that book since I was fourteen. I've written a hundred of those lines myself, and every one I wrote, I tried to find a way not to. I took my wages in a drawer and gave them out, a shilling here, four pounds there, and I lied to my own father in a ledger for ten years. And you looked at me and saw a pen."
My voice shook, and I let it.
"You saw the girl who held the pen that wrote your family's death. I was four years old when your croft went, Erlend. Four. I was on my mother's knee."
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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