19. The Secret Parchments
XIX
THE SECRET PARCHMENTS
The ink had begun as prayer, as a secret way to better learn to read and write after her time with Father Osbert.
Scratched with a dull quill onto parchment margins between Psalms and the Book of Ruth, her first entries were whispered names—so they would not be lost. So they would be lifted to heaven by the breath of paper and memory.
There was Mareth of the Outer Fields, who died in childbirth.
Ralph ab Glyn hanged for theft. A child at thirteen. She’d prayed for him, but the one drop of her pendant’s poison had not taken with the boy, though it likely dulled the pain. She should have used two drops.
Another: Bridget, the midwife, perished of fever after attending the Baroness’s stillborn.
At first, it was only these. Small marks. Silent griefs.
Father Osbert had taught her the letters at her request for religious devotion. He believed she was memorizing saints. She was. But she was also remembering those whom death had taken.
Sior, the brother of her former stable boy, was executed for stealing. Her poison had saved him from pain.
A girl only known as Lydia. She had been taken as a concubine for Lord Stafford’s retinue in return for his assistance at Lord Henry’s border. She was never seen again.
The deaths weren’t all bloody. Some were simply from starvation in the wrong month. Most were for stealing food, and she had to be mindful of the poison’s chamber.
She needed to keep at least three in case Henry tried to kill her. It would be the only time she’d use poison for murder, not mercy. She prayed the Lord to take him in battle or illness, nonetheless.
By winter, the margins grew too narrow as her womb swelled with child again, just as Lord Henry wanted. She asked Osbert for discarded scraps.
“For practice,” she’d said.
He smiled and encouraged her discipline, praised her growing hand. He did not know what she was writing.
When she counted, there had been ninety-eight counts of death for stealing food. The others summed fifty-one altogether.
So she began to keep grain counts. Tithe notes. Women’s names from the chapel garden—their families, their burdens. Every whisper that passed through the courtyard, she turned into a record.
To have something real, something that proved the pain was not imagined. That she had not dreamed the suffering. That the truth lived somewhere, even if it only lived beneath her child’s cradle or the loose stone near the altar where she’d pressed the parchment tight and sealed it with beeswax.
Every injustice she heard—every hasty trial, every man executed for loyalty to the Welsh or the Scots—every time Erik lowered his eyes after returning from a sentence he’d been ordered to carry out, she wrote it down.
She had no power to stop it, but she wouldn’t let it vanish.
She wrote Erik’s name once.
Not because he had died, but because she feared he was dying inside, piece by piece, every year, Henry ordered him to strike down the defenseless for a petty crime and refuse him time with his growing son.
Her favor grew with the people. Hungry knights took her peace offerings of bread to their families. Women in the garden smiled when she passed and nodded to her.
Henry noticed her silence and the long hours she spent in the chapel with the children. She watched Henry watch her—more now than before. His pride was hot. He was a man who feared what he could not control.
Henry would one day kill her, but she hoped that all the favors, all the trust and goodwill, would somehow bring together a broken land and instate her son, David, as a noble lord of peace.
She had come for peace between her people and the Normans, and now, she only hoped peace would stay because of her life.