Read Chapter 11: The Last Confession

The chapel door hung ajar, a thin blade of candlelight cutting across the cold stone floor. Thomas slipped through and pulled it shut behind him, the latch clicking like a bone snapping. The air inside smelled of old wax and something fouler—sickness, the sweet rot of a body failing from within.

Father Aldous knelt before the altar, his back to Thomas, a quill scratching across parchment. He did not turn. His hand moved slowly, each stroke deliberate, as if the words cost him blood.

“I wondered if you would come here,” Aldous said, his voice hollow in the vaulted dark. “I hoped you would not. That you would take the mill road and be gone by dawn.”

Thomas stepped closer. The ledger pressed against his ribs beneath his shirt, a hard, accusing weight. “I did not escape a cell to run from a village I can still save.”

Aldous stopped writing. His shoulders sagged. “You cannot save it.”

“The girl,” Thomas said. “Where is she?”

“In the sacristy. Agnes sits with her. She has maybe an hour—no more.” Aldous turned, and Thomas saw his face fully for the first time since the manor. The priest’s eyes were rimmed red, his jaw unshaven, his lips cracked. He looked like a man who had not slept in a week. “I have refused him. Richard knows it. There are guards at the manor gate already, waiting for his word.”

“Then we take the girl and go now,” Thomas said, moving toward the sacristy door.

“Wait.” Aldous rose, the parchment clutched in his fist. “Before you go, there is something you must know. Something I have never told anyone.”

Thomas stopped. The priest’s hand trembled, and for a moment Thomas saw the young man Aldous must have been before the plague came—before Richard’s debt had made him a tool of the dead.

“What?” Thomas said.

Aldous held out the parchment. “My confession. Forty-one names I signed. Forty-one souls I declared dead and delivered into Richard’s hands.” His voice cracked. “I told myself they were dead. That I was abbreviating their suffering into a few words of Latin. But I knew. I knew they were alive. I heard them weep through the chapel walls.”

Thomas did not take the parchment. “That confession will hang you.”

“It will hang me regardless.” Aldous pressed it into Thomas’s hands. His fingers were cold, the skin loose over the bone. “But there is one thing Richard does not know, and I will not carry it to my grave.”

He reached into his sleeve and drew out a folded square of vellum, the wax seal already broken. He pushed it into Thomas’s palm.

“The recipient,” Aldous said. “The man who buys them. I know his name.”

Thomas looked down at the vellum. The seal bore a crest he did not recognize—a wolf’s head above a cross. He unfolded it. The hand inside was cramped, mercantile, written in a clerk’s efficient Latin.

*To the good Father of Blencarn: The shipment of the 2nd of October was received in good order. Lord Marchant thanks you for your continued discretion. The next consignment should include no fewer than six able laborers. Payment as before, upon delivery to the gates of the Marshalsea.*

Thomas read the name. He read it twice. A coldness settled in his chest that had nothing to do with the chapel’s chill.

“Marchant,” he said. “Sir Robert Marchant?”

Aldous nodded slowly. “Keeper of the King’s prisons. He has a private holding within the Marshalsea, where debtors and gaol-sickness swallow men whole. No one asks what happens behind those walls. The guards are his men. The records are his to burn.”

Thomas stared at the vellum. He knew the name—every physician who practiced near London knew it. Marchant was a man of the court, a close adviser to King Edward’s council. He was untouchable.

“He does not need forty-one laborers,” Thomas said. “The Marshalsea is a prison, not a farm. What does he do with them?”

Aldous shook his head. “I have asked the same question a hundred times. I have never received an answer. But I have heard whispers, from the few who have served in his household, that the prisoners who are given to Marchant do not age. That they are seen years later, unchanged, serving in his private wing of the gaol. And that they are never permitted to leave.” He paused. “There is a physician in London who works for him. A man named Dr. Vere. The villagers are taken to Vere first, before they are led to the Marshalsea. Some say he studies them. Some say he uses them for his experiments.”

Thomas’s stomach turned. He had heard such stories before, on the road—tales of noblemen who believed the plague could be transmuted into immunity if only enough bodies were bled and studied. He had dismissed them as the fancies of frightened peasants.

Now, he was not so certain.

“That is all I know,” Aldous said. “Take it. Find help beyond this village. Anyone who can be trusted. The Bishop will not act against Richard—he is owed too much for the miracle to be false. But London... London has other powers. Magistrates. Justices. Men who despise Marchant and would see him fall.”

Thomas folded the vellum and tucked it into his shirt beside the ledger. “And the girl?”

“Agnes will not let her go easily. But if we can get her out of the sacristy window, the cart in the mill will take you as far as the Keswick road.” Aldous hesitated. “There is something else.”

“What?”

“The crypt sounds Richard heard tonight.” Aldous lowered his voice, glancing toward the chapel doors. “They were not his men. I sent for a boy, a stablehand from the next village, to bring word to the Bishop of what Richard has done. I do not know if he got through. But if he was caught, Richard will know I have betrayed him in more than words.”

As if summoned by the words, a heavy fist pounded on the chapel door. The wood groaned. A man’s voice called out, muffled through the grain: “Father Aldous. By order of Sir Richard, you are to come to the manor immediately.”

Aldous closed his eyes. “Go,” he whispered. “The sacristy. Now.”

Thomas did not move. “I cannot leave you to hang.”

“You can. You will.” Aldous grabbed his arm, fierce suddenly, his fingers digging into Thomas’s sleeve. “The girl is all that matters. Save her, and let the confession go. I have lived with this sin for three years. I will not have your death on my soul as well.”

The pounding came again, harder. A second voice joined the first. Thomas heard the scrape of metal—a sword being drawn from a scabbard.

“Take the window in the sacristy,” Aldous said. “It leads to the graveyard. The old yew tree will cover your passage to the mill.”

Thomas hesitated. Then he pressed the parchment into Aldous’s hand.

“Take it back,” he said. “If I am caught, it must not be found on me. Keep it hidden. Whatever happens to you, keep it safe.”

Aldous gaped. “But the name—you need it—you must carry it out of here, to London, to find justice—“

“I will find justice,” Thomas said. “But not as a dead man searched by Richard’s guards. You will survive this. You will wait for me. And when I return, I will hold the proof of your confession in my hand, and you will speak it aloud to the men who can act on it. Do you understand, Father?”

The door splintered at the hinges. A guard’s gauntlet punched through the wood, grasping for the latch.

Aldous looked at Thomas for a long moment. Something shifted in his eyes—fear, and then a fragile, desperate hope. He nodded, once, and tucked the parchment into his cassock.

“Go,” he breathed. “Go now.”

Thomas went. He crossed the chapel in three strides, threw open the sacristy door, and found Agnes crouched beside a pallet on the floor, a girl of perhaps twelve years curled beneath a thin blanket. The girl’s face was pale, her lips blue, her breath ragged and slow. Agnes looked up at him, her eyes wide.

“The window,” Thomas said.

Agnes did not ask questions. She lifted the girl in her arms with a strength Thomas had not known she possessed, and Thomas shoved open the narrow casement. Cold night air rushed in. Beyond, the graveyard lay silver under a half-moon, the great yew casting a shadow like a claw.

The main doors of the chapel crashed open behind him. A voice roared Aldous’s name.

Thomas climbed through the window and turned back, reaching for the girl. Agnes passed her into his arms, light as a bundle of kindling. He saw her face in the moonlight—so small, so fragile—and he saw the seal of the letter he had just given Aldous glittering in his mind’s eye.

Marchant.

The name burned in him like coal.

He heard Aldous’s voice from the chapel, steady and calm: “I am here. There is no need for that. I will come quietly.”

Then he heard a fist land, a grunt of pain, and a body hit the stone floor.

Agnes climbed out the window behind him, and they ran.