He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Hallgerd

The shop was dark when we came to it, with one lamp burning in the back room.

Erlend stopped at the door.

"She asked for you first," he said. "I'll wait."

"She asked for you too," I said.

"On my own. I heard." He looked at the lamp. "I'll wait."

I went in alone.

Hallgerd sat at the little table where she took her tea, with her shawl over her knees and her spectacles on their string.

She did not look surprised to see me.

She looked like a woman who had been sitting a long time, listening to a clock.

"Shut the door, lass," she said.

I shut it.

"Sit."

"Hallgerd, what's wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong that hasn't been wrong twenty years." She folded her hands. "I'll not say it tonight. I'll tell you why not."

I sat on the other chair, and my knees were cold.

"The man out there is the right man," she said. "I'd the sense of it the first night he stood at my counter with that case. But I'll not say a word of it in front of his brother, and I'll not say it to him alone, because he'd go at it with his hands."

"What would he do?"

"What would any man do who'd heard it?" She shook her head. "He'd go at his brother. And his brother has a way of being at home in any room, and a lawyer at Lerwick, and twenty years of Erlend's trust, and I've a head full of grey hair and a page."

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