Read Chapter 12: The Burning Shame

The chapel door was heavier than it looked, and it swung inward with a groan that seemed to echo through the whole damned village. Thomas stepped inside, the smell of tallow and old incense hitting him like a shroud. The dying girl lay on a pallet before the altar, her face the color of bone, her breath a shallow wheeze. A single candle burned at her side, gutting its light across her hollow cheeks.

He crossed the nave in three strides, his hand already reaching for her wrist to check for a pulse. Her skin was cold, but there—faint, thready, a heartbeat like a bird trapped in a fist. She was alive. Barely.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered, though he wasn’t sure she could hear him. He crouched, scanning the chapel for anything to carry her on. A length of sacking. A door he could pull off its hinges. Anything.

The candle guttered. The door behind him slammed shut.

Thomas spun. Two of Sir Richard’s men stood inside the threshold, crossbows leveled at his chest. Behind them, Sir Richard stepped into the candlelight, his face a mask of pleasant cruelty.

“Thomas Blackwood,” Sir Richard said, drawing the name out like a slow poison. “You’ve been a busy little worm, haven’t you? My study. My ledger. My correspondence.” He tsked. “I hope you enjoyed the reading.”

Thomas’s hand drifted toward the knife at his belt. One of the crossbowmen shifted, the bolt tracking his movement.

“Don’t,” Sir Richard said. “You’re fast, I’ll grant you that. But you’re not faster than a quarrel through the spine. Drop the knife. Drop the ledger.”

Thomas felt the weight of the book pressed against his ribs beneath his shirt. He hadn’t been careful enough. He’d been so focused on the girl, on Aldous, on the sounds in the crypt—he hadn’t cleared the yard before they closed in.

He let the knife fall. It clattered on the stone floor.

Sir Richard smiled. “Good. Now, the girl.” He nodded to his men. They stepped forward, one keeping the bow trained on Thomas, the other bending to lift the girl from her pallet.

“She’s dying anyway,” Sir Richard said, almost gently. “We’re simply… hastening her journey. A mercy, you might say. She’ll fetch a better price in London if she makes the trip alive. But if she dies tonight, well—” He shrugged. “There’s always the payment on the corpse. Plague victims fetch their own coin, you understand. The crown pays for their burning. It’s a tidy little system.”

Thomas’s hands curled into fists. “You’re selling the sick and the dead. And the people of this village think you’re saving them from the pox.”

“The pox.” Sir Richard let out a cold laugh. “There is no pox here, Blackwood. There hasn’t been for weeks. But the quarantine holds. The village tithes. The crown pays for the burning. And London gets its workers—those that survive the cart, anyway. Everyone thrives. Everyone but the unfortunate few, and they were unfortunate long before I arrived.”

The man lifted the girl. She stirred, a thin wail escaping her lips, but she didn’t wake. Thomas surged forward. The crossbow thrummed, and a bolt tore through the meat of his shoulder before he’d taken two steps. The impact spun him, sent him crashing into a pew. Pain lanced up his neck, hot and white.

“I said don’t,” Sir Richard said. “Now you’ve gone and made a mess of my chapel floor.” He gestured to the men. “Take him to the crypt. Chain him with the others.”

Thomas tried to rise, but a boot slammed into his ribs, rolling him onto his back. The world swam. Rough hands grabbed his arms, hauled him across the stones, and dragged him through a low door behind the altar. Stairs spiraled down into blackness. The smell hit him first—rot, lye, and the cloying sweetness of death left too long in warmth.

The crypt opened around him like a throat. Torches guttered on the walls, revealing what the village never saw: the bodies. They lay in stacked rows against the far wall, in rough pine coffins and bare on the stone where the coffins had run out. Dozens of them. The plague-dead who had never been buried, never been mourned. Below them, trenches had been dug, and workers were piling the bodies with pitch-soaked brushwood.

“The burning pit,” Thomas murmured, his voice a rasp.

“They burn at dawn,” Sir Richard said from behind him. Thomas hadn’t heard him descend. “We cull the sick, declare them dead, and burn the evidence—or send them south in the barrels. It’s efficient. Even the Church approves. Money cleanses all sins, or so Aldous thought.” He laughed. “He’ll learn better soon enough.”

Thomas was shoved toward an iron ring set in the wall. A manacle closed around his wrist, then the other. The chain clinked, short and unforgiving. He could barely move more than a step in any direction.

“I’d have drowned you in the marsh and called it a plague death,” Sir Richard said, stepping close, his voice low and intimate. “But you’ve become something of a spectacle. The villagers heard the fuss. They saw you dragged in. So we’ll give them a proper show. You’ll be found in the bog in the morning—body bloated, skin blackened with the pox that never touched you. The girl will be declared dead. Aldous will sign. And the ledger—” He patted his chest, where the book now rested. Thomas felt his own ribs ache with the absence of it.

“The ledger returns to my study,” Sir Richard said. “And you return to the earth.”

He nodded to the workers. One of them approached with a cart—not for the bodies, but for Thomas. A cage of rusted iron on wheels, built to hold the condemned. They unlocked the manacles and dragged him toward it. Thomas’s shoulder screamed. His vision blurred.

They shoved him in. The cage door clanked shut. The chain rattled through the lock, and Sir Richard pocketed the key.

“The marsh is kind tonight,” Sir Richard said, looking down at him. “Quiet. Dark. You’ll be gone before the dawn, and the village will weep for you. A healer, lost to the plague.” He smiled. “It’s the story they need to hear.”

He turned. The torchlight flickered over his retreating back as he climbed the stairs, and the crypt door slammed shut above, sealing Thomas in the dark with the dead.