Erased by My Family at Seventeen, I Heard Every Lie at Eighteen novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Struck in Pencil
At her 17th birthday supper Theron refuses her, the keeper stops her record and her family goes silent; she carries her own bag to the river boat and finds the Watch notice on the dock post.
On her seventeenth birthday, Linnea Blomqvist stood at the head of the long hall while every family on the river watched her.
The betrothal ring had been on her hand for four years.
Theron Draycott stood across from her in his grey dress coat with a folded paper in his fingers.
Her father sat at the high table. Her mother sat beside him with both hands flat on the cloth.
"Lord Draycott," said the archive keeper. "You asked to speak before the supper."
"I did," Theron said.
He unfolded the paper and looked at it.
He did not look at Linnea.
"I, Theron Draycott, refuse the betrothal made with Linnea Blomqvist. I will not marry her. I release my name from every promise made for her."
He read it in one flat breath and folded the paper again.
Nobody in the hall made a sound.
Linnea waited for him to lift his eyes.
He looked at the floor beside her feet.
"That's all?" she said.
"That is all," said Theron.
He walked out through the side door, and the door closed behind him.
Linnea turned to the high table. "Father?"
Her father picked up his knife and cut the bread.
The keeper carried the great Archive to its stand at the end of the hall. It was the book that held every Blomqvist birth, betrothal and death for six hundred years.
He opened it to her page.
The ink bottle stood open on the stand beside him.
He took a stub of pencil from his coat and wrote with that instead.
Linnea went close enough to read it.
Linnea Blomqvist, born the ninth of Harvest. Betrothal ended. Record closed.
She had stood in this hall every Harvest of her life and watched the keeper write the year beneath her name.
"What did I do?" she asked him.
The keeper closed the book and did not answer.
Her cousins had stopped eating. Her uncles stared at their plates.
Her mother rose and walked down the length of the hall, straight toward Linnea.
"Mother, please. Tell me what I did."
Her mother walked around her. She did not slow down. She did not turn her head.
Her three brothers followed in a line, the youngest first, and each one stepped around Linnea without a word.
Bram went last. He was the eldest, and he had taught her to row.
"Bram."
His jaw tightened. He kept walking.
At the high table her father sat alone with his bread.
"Father, I am standing right here."
He took a drink from his cup.
A young cousin slid into Linnea's empty chair at the long table and reached for her plate.
Nobody told the girl to stop.
Linnea understood it then, all at once.
The Blomqvists did not shout at the people they cast out.
They stopped seeing them.
She stood in the hall until the servants began to clear the tables around her.
A maid carried a tray past without a glance.
Linnea would not cry in front of them. She had seen what they did with a person who had nothing left to show them.
She walked up to her room and found the door open and the bed stripped.
Her wardrobe had been emptied onto the floor.
She packed what she could carry into her old school bag, two shirts, her mother's wool shawl that had been left in the chest, and her rowing gloves.
On the stairs she met her father's housekeeper, who had braided her hair every morning for eleven years.
The woman looked at the wall.
So Linnea went out the front door by herself, down through the orchard and across the wet lawn to the river landing.
At the end of the dock lay the Heron, the old family boat nobody had used since her grandfather died.
A lantern was already lit on its deck.
There was a sack of bread and a folded blanket beside it, and a key hung on a nail by the cabin door.
She thought the cook had done it out of pity.
Linnea stepped aboard and sat down on the planks with the bag in her lap.
It was the first time in her life she had been alone with no one to explain what she was.
Her name was out of the book. Her family had stopped hearing her. The man she was promised to would not even look at her.
She sat there until the lantern burned low.
Then she got up, because there was nothing else to do with a night like this but get through it.
On the dock post at the landing, a new notice was nailed up with its edges still white.
She held the lantern to it.
THE CROWN WATCH TAKES ANYONE WITH NO FAMILY RECORD AND NO DEBTS. APPLY AT GREYWATER KEEP.
Linnea read it twice.
Then she pulled the nail out with her fingers, folded the notice into her pocket and went to find a way to Highcastle before the sun came up.
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