Read Chapter 9: The Manor's Mask

The manor house was quieter than a grave, which was fitting, given what Thomas suspected lay beneath it.

He pressed his back against the cold stone of the pantry wall, listening to the retreat of boots on the floor above. Sir Richard's guard—Martin, if the whispered conversations in the mill had been accurate—made his rounds with a heavy, predictable tread. Thomas counted the steps. Twenty-three from the east wing to the great hall. Eighteen back. A pause at the window. Then the pattern repeated.

Thomas had memorized it in the two hours he'd spent crouched in the darkness, waiting for the household to settle.

The pantry door hung loose on its hinges, and beyond it stretched the servants' corridor that led to the private study. Agnes had told him the room's location the night before, her voice barely a breath against his ear in the mill's shadow. *The room with the iron lock. He keeps everything there. Everything that matters.*

The corridor smelled of tallow and old bread. Thomas moved through it with his shoes wrapped in strips of cloth torn from his shirt, each step silent as a held breath. His hands—raw from digging through the cell's crumbling mortar—found the study door before his eyes adjusted to the dark. The lock was iron, heavy, and mocking. But the hasp that held it had been driven into oak that had swollen with a century of damp.

Thomas drew the blade from his belt—small, sharp, the one tool he'd refused to surrender when they'd stripped him in the cell. He worked it between hasp and wood, prying, levering, sweating in the chill air. The oak groaned. He stopped, listening.

Nothing.

He pressed harder. The hasp gave with a splintering crack that seemed louder than thunder in the silence.

The study was a tomb of ledgers. They lined the shelves, row after row of bound leather, each spine marked with a year in faded ink. Thomas did not bother with the old ones. He went to the desk—carved walnut, polished to a gleam that caught the sliver of moonlight through the window—and pulled at the drawers until he found the one that refused to open. Locked. He used the blade on it too, and the lock surrendered with a soft click that felt almost like a sigh.

Inside lay a single book. Newer than the others. Red leather, unmarked. Thomas lifted it into his hands and felt the weight of what it contained before he opened it.

The first page was dated March of that year. Three columns. Name. Date. Disposition.

*Agnes Miller. March 12. Deceased.*

Thomas's breath stopped. Agnes was alive—she had been alive hours ago, helping him escape his cell. But the entry next to her name had a notation in a different hand, smaller and tighter. *Rescinded. Goods defective. Returned to stock.*

He turned the page.

The names blurred past as his eyes raced down the entries. Men he'd treated in the village square. Women he'd seen at the well. Children. Dozens of children, all marked with the same word, over and over, in letters that grew darker and more deliberate with each page.

*Deceased. Deceased. Deceased.*

But Thomas knew better now. He flipped to the back of the book, where the entries grew recent. And there he found it.

*Thorne, Margaret (9 yrs). Deceased. Transferred via Wrexham. Destination: London. Recipient: T.M.*

Margaret Thorne. Elias's daughter.

Not dead. *Transferred.*

He closed the ledger and stood in the dark, feeling the shape of the thing Sir Richard had built. He'd thought it was about plague corpses—a gruesome hoard preserved to maintain the fiction of Blencarn's miracle until the Bishop's debt could be cleared. But the ledger revealed something worse. Plague victims were only part of the equation. The others—the sick, the unwanted, the inconvenient—they were not buried in that hidden crypt. They were being sold.

Sold and shipped to London like cargo. With false dates of death to erase them from the world.

Thomas was so focused on the ledger that he almost missed the letter tucked into the back cover.

It was folded tight, the paper thick and creamy, sealed with wax the color of dried blood. The crest pressed into that wax was not one Thomas recognized—a stag's head above a cross, encircled by words too small to read in the low light. He broke the seal.

The handwriting was elegant, practiced, the hand of a man accustomed to having his words read aloud.

*Sir Richard,*

*The goods arrived in serviceable condition, though I fear the last shipment was thinner than expected. The demand remains steady, and my clients pay well for the assurance that their affairs are concluded without embarrassing survivals. Do not presume this indulgence is limitless. The plague makes orphans by the thousands, and every one of them is a mouths-to-feed on my rolls. You owe the Church more than you owe me, but I am less patient than the Bishop.*

*The next consignment must be larger. The disruption at the mill two years hence cost me three hands, and I intend to see that loss recovered. Send more, and send them quietly. The Bishop's seal on the death certificates remains the crucial fulcrum—Father Aldous has signed faithfully, but I hear his conscience has begun to prick. See that it does not. A silent priest is a living priest.*

*T.M.*

Thomas read it twice. Then a third time, letting the full weight of it settle into his bones. T.M. The recipient in London. The noble who thought of plague orphans as *mouths to feed* and villagers as *goods*. He folded the letter carefully and tucked it into his shirt, next to his skin.

Footsteps. Heavy. Approaching down the corridor.

Thomas moved without thinking, sliding the ledger inside his shirt alongside the letter, and pressed himself into the shadow behind the door. The footsteps grew louder, passed the study—and stopped.

"The door."

The voice was Sir Richard's. Low and flat and furious.

Thomas closed his eyes. He heard the creak of the study door opening, felt the spill of candlelight across his boots.

"He was here." Sir Richard's voice came from inside the room now, no more than ten feet away. "The lock. He broke the lock."

A second voice, wearier. "The cell was breached. I told you he was cleverer than your men gave him credit for."

Father Aldous.

"He's breaching a great deal more than that." A pause, and the sound of a drawer being opened. Thomas could hear Sir Richard's breathing change—the sharp intake of air when he found the ledger missing. "The book. The letter. He has them."

"Then find him." Aldous's voice echoed strangely, as if he'd turned to face the window. "He cannot have gone far. He has no horse, no supplies."

"He has my ledger. He has your letter." Sir Richard's voice had gone quiet in the way of a man straining to contain a tide of violence. "If he reaches the cloth merchants at Wrexham—"

"He will not reach Wrexham." Aldous cut him off. "The guard at the crossroads has his description. The gates remain sealed. He is trapped within the village boundaries, and any villager who shelters him will be named a plague carrier and burned with their house."

Thomas heard the soft thud of something hitting wood—Sir Richard's fist, perhaps, or the flat of his hand against the desk.

"The plague," Sir Richard said slowly, tasting the word. "The plague has been useful, Father. But plague burns. Plague leaves no witness. We cannot counterfeit it for a man who has already died once and been seen to live."

The silence stretched. Thomas held his breath.

"When the sun rises," Sir Richard said, his voice smooth as polished bone, "I want his head on a pike in the square. We will tell the village he fled in the night—the same story we told for Thorne—and we will set about convincing them he was taken by the sickness after all. They will believe it. They believe everything."

"Until they stop believing." Aldous's voice carried a weight of warning that made the hairs rise on Thomas's arms. "The girl, Sir Richard. The one he was treating. She heard the men at the crypt. She survived the night. What happens when she speaks?"

"She will not speak." A pause. "She is young. The young are fragile. One fever takes them quickly if assisted properly."

Thomas's blood went cold. The girl. The dying girl whose name he did not even know, whose hand he had held while she told him of dark men carrying bodies to the chapel. She was alive—maybe still alive, if Father Aldous had not already done his work in the hours since Thomas had been taken from the cell.

And Sir Richard had just signed her death warrant.

Thomas's hand went to the blade at his belt. The weight of the ledger pressed against his chest, and beneath it, the letter. He could flee now—slip out through the pantry, reach the mill, wait for dawn. The evidence would mean nothing if he could not deliver it to someone who would act. But the girl. The girl could not wait.

"You will prepare the certificate tonight," Sir Richard was saying. "I want her name entered before the sun rises. No mistakes this time. The Bishop's auditors arrive in a fortnight, and I will not have a single irregularity remaining in these records."

"I will not."

The words hung in the air like a struck bell.

"What did you say?"

"I said I will not." Aldous's voice had changed. It held something Thomas had not heard before—a note of finality, of a man making peace with a terrible decision. "I have signed enough false deaths. I have damned myself enough times for your debts. The girl is innocent. She will not be added to your ledger."

"You forget yourself, Father." Sir Richard's voice had gone soft, almost tender. "You forget who holds your vows in his keeping."

"I forget nothing." The scrape of a chair. "But I remember what I am. And I am finished being your instrument."

Thomas heard a sound he knew intimately from his years of practice—the whisper of steel clearing leather.

"You will sign the certificate," Sir Richard said, "or I will carve your silence into something permanent."

The study fell into a hush so complete that Thomas could hear his own heartbeat, and beneath it, the ragged breathing of two men at the edge of a precipice.

And then, from somewhere far below them—from beneath the floor, beneath the earth itself—came a sound that made all three of them freeze.

A low, rhythmic scraping. The sound of something being dragged across stone.

The crypt. The sealed passages that Thomas had never proven existed, the ones Agnes had whispered about in the dark of the mill, the ones that connected the undercroft to the chapel's hoard of preserved dead.

Someone was moving bodies in the crypt. In the middle of the night. When no one was supposed to be down there.