Read Chapter 24: The Reckoning

The great hall stank of smoke and beeswax. Sir Richard sat at the head of the long oak table, a half-eaten capon before him, his fingers glistening with grease. Two guards flanked the doors. A fire crackled in the hearth, casting long shadows across the tapestries that hid the manor’s rot.

Thomas stepped from the servant’s alcove, the silver scalpel cold in his palm.

Sir Richard did not start. He set down his wine cup and smiled slowly, like a man greeting an old acquaintance at market.

“The corpse returns,” he said. “I declared you dead this morning. Must I correct the record?”

“You’ll correct more than that before the night is out.” Thomas advanced, keeping the table between himself and the guards. “I know about the graves, Richard. The empty graves. I know you’ve been selling your own people.”

Sir Richard laughed, a dry, rattling sound. “Selling? Such a common word. I prefer ‘redistributing.’ The village has more mouths than it can feed. The plague trims what God leaves behind.”

“You’re the plague,” Thomas said. “You and your debt.”

That flicker. A twitch at the corner of Sir Richard’s mouth. He reached for his wine, drank deeply, and set the cup down with care.

“Debt,” he repeated. “You’ve been speaking to the widow. A foolish woman with a dead husband’s ledgers and too much time to grieve.”

“I’ve been speaking to the dead themselves,” Thomas said. “They told me everything.”

The guards shifted. Sir Richard raised a hand, stilling them. He leaned back in his chair, studying Thomas the way a falconer studies a wounded bird.

“You think you understand,” Sir Richard said, “but you’ve been reading the wrong pages. The debt is real. The village owes more than it can ever repay. But the servants I send away—do you know where they truly go?”

“A ship,” Thomas said. “The cove. Tonight.”

“Tonight.” Sir Richard’s smile widened. “Yes. But not as servants, physician. Think harder.”

Thomas felt the floor tilt beneath him. The gravediggers had said the like—forced to dig empty graves, prisoners moved under the full moon. He had assumed the manor traded in labor, selling the desperate and the inconvenient to manors short on hands. But the sexton had been poisoned. The carpenter tortured. Sir Richard did not go to such lengths for farmhands.

He thought of the letter he had written to the King’s justice. Plague carriers. He had written plague carriers.

“You’re not selling them as servants,” Thomas said slowly. “You’re selling them as plague.”

Sir Richard clapped. Once, loud and sharp. “There. The physician finally bleeds the correct vein. Yes. Do you know what a village fears more than the pox, Blackwood? A village that believes its neighbor carries it. A lord whose lands are barren of workers will pay handsomely for a wagon of ‘infected’ flesh—delivered quietly, in the night, to a place where no one thinks to ask who they were before the rash appeared.”

The room seemed to contract. Thomas’s fingers tightened on the scalpel.

“You paint them,” he said. “Open sores, red blotches. You send them to other towns to spread the fear—not the disease, just the terror of it—and when those towns pay you to take the ‘sick’ away, you return with the same people, repainted, to do it again.”

“Clever, isn’t it?” Sir Richard rose, walking slowly around the table. The guards did not move. They had seen this performance before. “One village’s debt is another village’s plague price. The same poor souls, bleeding through in the night, kept alive just enough to be useful. And when they die—as they sometimes do—we bury them empty and say the pox took them, and no one questions why the plague never truly spreads.”

“Nell Carter,” Thomas said. “She’s not infirm. She was chosen for a reason.”

“The apothecary’s daughter.” Sir Richard’s eyes glittered. “Educated. Comely. She’ll fetch a premium as a ‘nurse’ sent to comfort the dying. Some lords pay double for a tender hand on a fevered brow.”

Thomas saw it then. The whole machine of it. The debt was to a lord who had funded this scheme from the beginning—some distant noble with empty coffers and a talent for cruelty, using Sir Richard as his agent in the filth. The village was not quarantined because of plague. It was quarantined because it was a farm. A farm of fear.

“The debt,” Thomas said. “You owe it to the man who bought the first shipment. The one who taught you this.”

Sir Richard’s smile vanished. For a heartbeat, something cold and genuine flickered behind his eyes.

“You think yourself so clever with your letters and your scalpels,” he said softly. “But you are standing in my hall, in my manor, on my land. You have a blade the size of a child’s finger and a dead man’s key in your pocket. Who will believe you, physician? The villagers who fear me? The guards who feed their families from my table? Or the lord in London who received your letter—and burned it this morning, at my request?”

Thomas’s blood turned to ice.

“You’re a man with nothing,” Sir Richard continued, stepping closer. “No allies. No proof that lives. The sexton is dead. The gravediggers fear me more than they fear God. Nell Carter is bound for a ship that will sail before dawn, and you stand here, in my hall, with a stolen blade and a story that sounds like the fever dream of a plague doctor who has breathed too much foul air.”

He stopped an arm’s length from Thomas, close enough to smell the wine on his breath.

“You have discovered nothing,” Sir Richard said. “You have only confirmed what I already knew. That you are a lone physician, a long way from home, with no one to save and no one to save you.”

Thomas raised the scalpel. The guards drew their swords.

And then the door to the hall crashed open, and the widow stood in the threshold, her face pale as bone, a single folded letter in her trembling hand.

“Sir Richard,” she said, her voice cracking like ice on a winter pond. “The trader read the letter before I stopped him. He has already ridden west.”

Sir Richard’s face went slack.

“He rides for London,” the widow said. “And he is not alone.”

Somewhere beyond the manor walls, a bell began to ring.