Read Chapter 10: A Forged Face

The study’s walls muffled the argument, but not enough. Thomas pressed himself flat against the panel beside the door—Sir Richard’s voice, low and venomous, cut through the oak like a blade.

“You will sign it, Aldous. You have signed a hundred like it.”

“I have signed lies,” the priest’s voice came back, thinner than Thomas remembered, but steadier. “I will not sign another. The girl is not dead. She is dying, yes—but she is not dead, and I will not make her so on parchment before God has taken her.”

A chair scraped. Something heavy thudded—a fist on the desk, likely. “God will take her by morning regardless. The fever has her. What difference does a day make?”

“A day is eternity to a soul unprepared. She has not received last rites. I will not deny her that and then write the lie that sends her body to the crypt and her name to London.”

Thomas’s breath caught. London. The word sat in the ledger against his chest like a coal. He had assumed the plague dead were being hidden—concealed to keep the miracle of Blencarn alive. But the girl was not plague-stricken. Agnes had said as much. The girl was dying of something else entirely, and they meant to bury her as plague and transfer her living body out of the village. Not a corpse, then. A commodity.

“You forget your place,” Sir Richard said, his voice dropping to almost a whisper. Thomas had to strain to hear. “You forget who put you in that chapel. You were nothing—a hedge priest with a drinking problem and a dead congregation. I gave you Blencarn. I gave you bread and wine and a roof. And you gave me signatures. That was the bargain.”

“The bargain is void when it costs souls.”

“Souls.” Sir Richard laughed—a short, ugly sound. “The plague takes souls. I am saving them. Every person I send to London is a person who would otherwise die of the sickness in this village. They breathe, Aldous. They live. They work off their passage in service and in time they are free.”

“In time.” Aldous’s voice cracked. “In time, you mean when they are dead. You sell them, Richard. You sell them to that man in London and tell their families they died of the plague. You make graves for the empty and call it mercy.”

“It is commerce,” Sir Richard said flatly. “And it has kept this village alive. The Bishop believes Blencarn is a miracle—a village spared by God’s grace. The pilgrims come. The coin flows. The debt shrinks. And every person who falls ill here is given a chance to live rather than a pyre. Do you not see the good in that?”

“I see the lie.”

“The lie is the miracle. Without the lie, the Bishop sends us all to the wall and the plague finishes what it started. We are one village, Aldous. One village in a kingdom of corpses. I am doing what must be done.”

Thomas shifted his weight. His leg had gone numb from crouching behind the doorframe. The ledger pressed warm against his ribs beneath his shirt. He needed to move—needed to be gone before either man exited. But the conversation held him pinned, the shape of the scheme finally clear.

They were not preserving bodies to fake a miracle. They were faking deaths to sell the living.

The girl in the chapel—the one Agnes had spoken of—was the next transaction. If Aldous refused to sign the death certificate, Sir Richard would find another way. Or he would simply kill the priest and forge the signature himself. Thomas had seen enough of Sir Richard’s hand to know it would match any document.

A crash from below made Thomas freeze. The sound came up through the floorboards—wood splintering, stone grinding. Both voices in the study went silent.

Sir Richard spoke first, low and tight. “What was that?”

“The crypt,” Aldous said. “Your men are not due tonight.”

“No.” The floor creaked as Sir Richard moved. “They are not.”

Thomas felt for the door at his back. He was in the corridor outside the study, a servant’s alcove barely large enough to hide a man if he pressed himself into the shadows. The bolt had been drawn when he first entered. If Sir Richard opened the study door now, Thomas would be caught in the open with the ledger under his shirt and no plausible story for his presence.

The floor beneath his feet vibrated again—a low, rhythmic thudding. Someone was moving through the passages below. Someone heavy. The crypt was not meant to be accessed from the manor, but Thomas knew the undercroft ran beneath the entire courtyard. He had felt its presence in his cell, heard its echoes in the night. Whatever was down there now was not a corpse being stored.

“You have someone in the passages,” Aldous said, his voice rising with something that might have been hope.

“I have no one,” Sir Richard snapped. “The only men who know the crypt are my own, and they are in the village tonight.”

“Then who?”

A long pause. Thomas could hear Sir Richard’s breathing—quick, ragged.

“Your physician,” Sir Richard said finally. “The one who escaped his cell. He has found the way down.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened. He had not found the way down. He was here, in the manor, pressed into an alcove no wider than his shoulders. But Sir Richard did not know that. Sir Richard thought Thomas was deeper into the scheme than he was—a ghost moving through the walls of the manor, a witness with the ledger in his hands.

Let him think it.

“If he has found the crypt,” Aldous said slowly, “he has found the bodies.”

“Bodies are not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

Sir Richard’s voice came again, harder now, stripped of pretense. “The ledger is the problem. It is gone from my study. I went to show you the new entry for the girl and found the drawer empty. Someone has taken it.”

Thomas pressed a hand to his chest. The ledger sat there, crinkled and warm, its pages thick enough to stop a knife. He had not planned to take it—had not planned most of what he had done since waking in that cell—but now it was his, and Sir Richard knew it was missing.

The study door swung open.

Thomas flattened himself into the alcove as Sir Richard stepped into the corridor, Aldous a step behind. The knight’s face was hard in the candlelight, jaw set. Aldous looked older, diminished, but there was something new in his eyes—a glint that had not been there when Thomas first met him in the chapel.

“You will stay here,” Sir Richard said, not looking back. “You will not move. If I find you have gone to the chapel or the village, I will have you hanged before the morning mass.”

“And the girl?”

“The girl will die as God wills it—or as I will it. The death certificate will be signed. If not by you, then by the priest I bring from Penrith, who will not know the difference between truth and a coin.”

Aldous said nothing. Sir Richard strode down the corridor toward the stairs leading to the undercroft, his boots heavy on the stone. The door to the crypt passage swallowed him. The sound of his steps faded, replaced by the low, wet echo of the underground.

Thomas waited. Aldous stood in the corridor, motionless, his face half-lit by the guttering candle in its sconce. He did not look toward the alcove. He did not seem to know Thomas was there.

Then he spoke, quiet enough that Thomas barely caught it.

“I have signed my name beside the deaths of forty-one people who are not dead.” His voice was hollow. “I have given them to London and called it plague. I have absolved them of lives they did not finish living. There is no confession long enough for that.”

He turned. His eyes found the alcove—found Thomas, pressed into the shadows. For a moment they stood in silence, the priest and the physician, the candle between them flickering.

“You took the ledger,” Aldous said. Not a question.

Thomas stepped out of the alcove. The corridor was empty behind Aldous. The way to the main door was open.

“I did,” Thomas said.

“Then you know what he is.” Aldous’s voice shook. “What I have helped him become.”

“I know what the ledger says. I do not know who buys them.”

Aldous closed his eyes. “Neither do I. Richard uses a name—T.M.—but I have never met the man. Only letters. Only coin.”

“Letters can be traced.”

“If you live long enough to trace them.” Aldous opened his eyes and looked past Thomas, toward the outer door. “You should go. Now. While he is below.”

“What about the girl?”

Aldous’s face twisted. “Go to the chapel. She is still there. The fever has taken her, but she breathes. If you can draw the sickness from her—if you can keep her alive past the morning—Richard cannot bury her without proof. He cannot forge a death that walks.”

Thomas hesitated. The ledger was his way out. The girl was his way in. One meant escape; the other meant staying.

He thought of the crypt beneath his cell, the corpses stacked like cordwood. He thought of the names in the ledger, forty-one souls sold to London.

“Where do I find her?”

“The chapel. The side chamber off the vestry. She is watched by one of Richard’s men.”

That was all Thomas needed. He moved past Aldous toward the outer door, the ledger pressed against his ribs, the priest’s gaze heavy on his back.

He was halfway through the door when Aldous spoke again.

“Thomas.”

He paused.

“If you fail,” the priest said, “if the girl dies and Richard has his certificate—there will be no stopping him. He will sell every soul in this village before the plague ever claims them.”

Thomas did not answer. He stepped out into the night, the door closing behind him, and the cold air hit his face like a promise.

He was going to the chapel. He was going to save the girl.

And he was going to find the man who bought souls in London.