Read Chapter 28: Brother John's Debt

The candle had burned down to a stub by the time Thomas found it. Not the ledger he sought—that would be too easy—but a repair receipt from the abbey scriptorium, dated six years past, noting the rebinding of a book of accounts for one Sir Payn de la Roche, nephew to the baron. The entry was unsigned, but the hand was unmistakable: Brother John's tidy, sloping script.

Thomas sat back on the cold stone floor of the archive, surrounded by ledgers and loose parchment. The night was deep; compline had come and gone, and no one had seen him slip through the library's rear door with a lantern shuttered to a crack. He had told Aldric he needed to clear his head. Instead, he had come to bury it in debt.

Brother John's debt. The infirmarian's account book had been among the first things seized after his arrest, handed to the abbot for safekeeping. But Aldric, preoccupied with the charter and the coming ordeal, had given Thomas leave to examine anything the abbey's defense might require. John's ledger was not evidence of innocence—of that Thomas was certain—but evidence of something else. Something that connected the dead monk to the baron's scheme more deeply than anyone had suspected.

Thomas had read the entries a dozen times before. John kept meticulous records: the cost of herbs, the wages of copiers, alms distributed to the poor. But buried between the quarterly sums was a pattern too consistent to be accident. Every third month, for two years prior to the murders, John had recorded a "loan to household of Sir Payn de la Roche." The amounts varied—six livres, nine, four—but the regularity was damning. A monk did not lend money to a knight's household; he gave alms or accepted tithes. This was correspondence, a flow of coin that moved only one way.

Now, with the repair receipt in his hand, Thomas saw the other side of it. De la Roche had sent payments to the abbey too—small sums, earmarked "services rendered," covering the rebinding of books, the copying of charters. Sir Payn had been paying Brother John for something. And Brother John had been paying Sir Payn back, or forward, in a currency that never touched the abbey's coffers.

Thomas ran his finger down the list of services in the receipt's margin. *Commendation of grant, verified*—what grant? *Copying of boundary description, supplied from exemplar*—an exemplar, as if the copyist did not know the original. His chest tightened. Brother John had not merely owed the baron's nephew a debt. He had been the man who drafted the forged charter's language, testing it against the abbey's own records to make sure the alteration would pass notice. The debt was not money. It was obligation. A man who forged for you could not refuse to do it again, and could not speak of it without destroying himself.

Thomas set the receipt down and reached for the next bundle, the abbey's own records of expenses for the years before the murders. Two lines caught his eye: a payment to Brother John for "travel to Paris, to consult medical texts," incurred four years past, and another for "return journey, delayed." He checked the infirmarian's personal ledger again. There it was: during that same month, John had recorded no loan. Instead, he had written a single line, crossed out so thoroughly the quill had torn the vellum. Thomas angled the lantern, but the ink had been gouged away too deeply to recover.

He set his jaw. Whatever John had done in Paris, it had cost him more than he could repay in coin. It had cost him his soul, perhaps—or the fear that he had one.

The outer door to the archive creaked. Thomas killed the lantern flame and pressed himself against the shelf, heart pounding. Footsteps, deliberate, not the shuffle of a brother seeking a lost psalter. They stopped at the threshold, then moved again, away, toward the opposite corridor. Thomas waited until silence returned before daring to breathe.

When he relit the lamp, he was shaking less from fear than from the shape of what he had found. He had come looking for a debt; he had found a chain. Brother John's debt to Sir Payn, Sir Payn's payments to the abbey for services that had never been sanctioned. But the chain extended further. De Vere had come with Sir Hugh at his side, his cousin to the baron's nephew. If the envoy had been chosen because of that connection, then the chain reached all the way to the king's court. And the link at its end was not the baron.

Thomas spent the next hour combing the ledgers until he found it. A single entry, three years past, in the abbey's own accounts—a "gift to the household of Robert de Vere, in recognition of his service to the Crown." The amount was modest, a courtesy, the sort of thing abbots sent to noblemen who had once helped them secure a privilege. But the year was wrong. De Vere had been elevated to the bench of royal envoys six years past. There was no reason for the abbey to send him a gift three years later, unless the abbey had been asking for something in return.

Thomas sat back, staring at the line until the candle guttered in its own wax pool.

Brother John was not the only one with a debt. The abbey itself had a history with the man who now rejected its evidence, and De Vere might have come here already knowing what verdict the king required. The trial by ordeal was not a test of the charter's truth. It was a formality, a show of God's judgment, for a decision already made in a chamber far above Thomas's reach.

He closed the ledger, gathered the receipts, and tucked them into his sleeve. As he moved toward the door, his foot struck a loose floorboard, and it gave slightly under his weight. He knelt, pried at the edge, and found a hollow space beneath. In it lay a single sheet of parchment, folded and sealed with the baron's signet—not the crude wax of an underling, but the great seal used for correspondence to be read personally.

Thomas broke it open. The letter was dated six months before his arrival at Saint-Giles, and it was addressed to Sir Hugh. It read: *"Our business is near its end. When the abbey's claim fails, the mill lands fall to my brother's line, and your cousin's debt is settled in full. Do not fail me as Brother John did."* It was signed with the baron's initials.

The message had never been sent. It was a draft, retained in the archive—Thomas could not say how—and its existence meant the baron's conspiracy stretched back to before the first murder. And it meant Sir Hugh had known, the whole time, what verdict De Vere was meant to render.

The mill. The land. The deaths. They had never been about God or justice or even the charter. They had been about settling a debt between a knight and a baron, and the abbey had burned for it.

Thomas slipped the letter into his sleeve beside the receipts and slipped out of the archive into the night. The ninth hour would come with the dawn. But now he had something no ordeal could disprove: the baron's own hand, admitting the game.