The Rejected Luna's Revenge novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Flour Sack

The flour sack turned out to hold forty-one years of grudges.

Demelza spread it open on the long table in the Hall's great room, with the cook and the Beta on either side, and read the names aloud.

It was a list in pencil, in a dozen different hands, of every Brocklehurst wolf who had been promised something and never given it.

A winter coat, a cottage roof, a hospital bill, a school fee.

"The fence-man's widow," the Beta said. "He was hurt on the north fence. They said they'd pay."

"They didn't?"

"They said it was coming."

"Then it's coming now."

She took the checkbook from the Ridge's account, which the Council clerk had unlocked with a wry little bow, and wrote the first one in front of everyone.

The cook cried openly.

The old guard with the white moustache held his own paper in both hands and read it twice.

"Forty years I carried a gun for this house," he said. "I never saw this much money in one place."

"It was always yours."

"It was in a sack."

"I know," said Demelza. "I'm sorry it took this long."

By noon the line ran out the front doors and down the porch steps.

She wrote until her hand cramped.

Nobody thanked her in a long speech.

They simply said her name, quietly, one after another, as they went past.

When the last person had gone, the Beta put his hands flat on the table.

"Miss MacShane. We have to put something on the Council's form. The pack needs a name."

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