Read Chapter 32: The Queen's Decree

The council chamber doors closed behind Thomas with a hollow thud that seemed to echo through his bones. He stood in the corridor, blinking in the gray London light that fell through high windows, and for a moment he simply breathed. The air smelled of dust and old parchment and, faintly, of the river.

Emmeline was there—Eleanor, he reminded himself, she had told him her true name in the quiet of the night watch—and Agnes beside her. The widow's face was weathered but soft with relief. Eleanor's eyes searched his.

"They dismissed it," Thomas said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. "All of it."

Agnes let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Then we've won."

Thomas wanted to believe her. He wanted to feel the lightness that should accompany such a verdict, the end of a reckoning that had hung over him for years. But the Earl of Marchmont's whisper still coiled in his ears, and the faces of the council members had been hard to read behind their robes. They had dismissed the charge of desertion. They had not embraced him.

A servant in royal livery approached, a sealed parchment in his hand. He stopped before Thomas and bowed. "Dr. Blackwood. A decree from the Queen's own hand, delivered at her instruction."

Thomas took the parchment. The seal was crimson wax, pressed with the royal arms. He broke it there in the corridor, Eleanor and Agnes crowding close to read over his shoulder.

The letter was brief, formal, and devastating in its clarity. By order of Queen Philippa, in the absence of the King, the practice of trading in plague corpses—the infection, transportation, and sale of diseased remains for profit—was declared a crime against crown and church, punishable by hanging. All commissions touching on quarantine were to be reviewed. And Thomas Blackwood, by virtue of his service and testimony, was appointed King's Physician for the Inspection of Plague-Stricken Villages, with authority to enter any township in England, examine its dead, and report directly to the council.

Thomas read it twice. Then a third time.

"They've given you a leash," Agnes said quietly. "A long one, but a leash nonetheless."

"Or they've given me a purpose," Thomas said. He folded the parchment carefully, feeling its weight. "I thought I would be done. I thought—" He stopped. He had thought many things in the years since Blackwood village had burned behind him. He had thought he could run far enough, treat enough patients, bury enough dead to outpace his guilt. He had been wrong.

Eleanor touched his arm. "What will you do?"

"There are villages I passed through on the road here," he said. "Market towns, crossroads hamlets. I saw the signs—the same signs I saw in Blencarn. The closed gates. The men who watched too closely." He looked down at the decree in his hands. "The ledger named dozens. But there will be more. There are always more."

The three of them stood in the corridor as servants streamed past with their errands. London was a city that did not stop for a man's reckoning. It had its own hungers, its own plagues.

"Then we go," Agnes said. "We go and we look."

Thomas met her eyes. The widow had lost her husband to Sir Richard's fraud, had watched her village burn, had walked out of the crypt with ash in her hair and a shovel still in her grip. She was not asking permission. She was stating a fact.

Eleanor nodded once. "My father's shop is gone. There is nothing for me in Blencarn but memory. I would rather be useful."

Thomas looked at them both—two women who had every reason to walk away, who had chosen instead to stand beside a man who had spent years running from himself. He did not deserve it. He was learning that this did not matter to them.

"Then we leave at dawn," he said.

The road north was softer than the road south had been. Spring was breaking across England, and the hedgerows were thick with new green. They traveled through villages that had never heard of Blencarn or Sir Richard's crypt, past churches where the bells rang clear and unafraid. And they traveled through villages that had heard. The signs were subtle—a gate closed at midday, a fumigator's cart parked too long in a square, a priest who would not meet Thomas's eyes when he asked after the sick.

He inspected three villages on the journey north. He found no brands, no ledgers, no secret processions of the dead. But he found fear, and fear was its own kind of infection.

When they crested the final hill above Blencarn, Thomas stopped. The village lay in the valley below, smoke rising from chimneys that had been cold when he left. The palisade gate stood open. He could see figures moving in the fields, bent over rows of early crops.

"It's alive," Eleanor said softly. She stood beside him, and her voice was thick. "I didn't think—"

"It is," Thomas said. "It's alive."

They walked down into the village together. The villagers came out to meet them—farmers and their wives, children trailing behind. Margaret the tavern keeper emerged from her door with a broom in her hand, and when she saw Eleanor, she dropped it and ran.

The reunion was loud and weeping and full of hands reaching to touch, as if to confirm the travelers were real. Agnes was embraced by the women who had survived the crypt with her. Thomas stood apart, watching, and found he did not mind the distance. It had been a long time since he had been part of such a moment. He was learning to be content with witnessing it.

But as the crowd thinned and the greetings faded, Thomas noticed something missing. He scanned the faces, the doorways, the church at the far end of the green.

"Father Aldous," he said to Margaret. "Has he returned?"

Her face clouded. "No. We've had no word. The church stands empty—we ring the bells ourselves on Sundays, and old Widow Hargreaves reads the lessons." She hesitated. "There was a rumor, a fortnight past. A peddler said he saw a man in a priest's robes being taken north, toward the moors. He thought nothing of it at the time. But he described the limp, the way he favored his left leg."

Thomas felt something cold settle in his chest. Aldous had disappeared during the fire, had followed Thomas to London to testify, and then had vanished again. He had expected the priest to return to his flock. He had not expected to lose him.

Eleanor read his face. "You're thinking of the ledger."

"I'm thinking of the men it named," Thomas said. "Gregory Cole is still in London, still on his commission. He doesn't know we have the ledger—or if he does, he knows his network is exposed. Men like that don't sit idle. They look for leverage." He looked north, toward the empty moors. "And they look for witnesses to silence."

Agnes came to stand beside him. "Then we go north."

"The villages there haven't been inspected," Thomas said. "It was the next name I had planned to visit. A place called Thornwick, in the hills beyond the moors."

"Then we leave tomorrow," Agnes said. It was not a question.

Thomas looked back at Blencarn—at the village that was healing, at the people who were learning to trust the morning again. He thought of the decree in his saddlebag, of the seal of the Queen's own hand. He thought of Aldous, wherever he was, and of the debt Thomas owed him.

"Yes," he said. "Tomorrow."

That night he slept in the tavern, in the same room he had taken on his first night in Blencarn. The walls were the same. The bed was the same. But the fear that had pressed in on him then, the certainty that he would be found out and punished, had loosened its grip. He lay in the dark and listened to the village sleep around him—no screams, no muffled processions, no smell of smoke. Just the ordinary sounds of people living.

In the morning, he would ride north. He would find Aldous, and he would find the men who had taken him. He would inspect Thornwick and every village after it, carrying the Queen's decree and the dead weight of everything he had learned.

He was still afraid. He suspected he would always be afraid. But for the first time since Blackwood had burned, the fear had a shape he could face.