Even though it had been two weeks since we’d found the journal, Gentry had gotten them to rush it. I didn’t ask how.
We sat at a long oak table, and Gentry scooted over to make more room. “This okay?” he asked gently, nodding toward the screen.
“Yeah,” I whispered.
The screen blinked as he brought up the first page.
Alban Stanton’s journal.
Brown ink bloomed across the digital parchment, elegant and slanted. The hand of a man who had once ruled something.
“I thought I’d feel excited,” I said, arms folded tight across my chest. “But it feels like reading a confession I was never meant to find.”
Gentry didn’t speak for a moment. Then, quietly, “You were always meant to find it. Or you wouldn’t be here now.”
My fingers hovered above the keyboard. “What if it confirms everything I feared? What if it’s nothing?”
“What if it sets you free?”
I turned to him. The archive light softened his features—less sharp than usual, his usual calm tinged with something else. Concern. Or maybe something deeper.
Outside, the night leaned against the windows, thick with frost. The kind of cold that came for bone and breath.
I took a breath, steady and thin. “Happy birthday to me,” I muttered.
Gentry’s eyes flicked up. He didn’t smile. He just said, “I know,” so quietly it made my throat close. He reached into his bag and slid something across the table. A single cupcake in a pink box. No candle. Just a ridiculous swirl of frosting in my favorite color.
“Archivist rules be damned,” he said, handing me a napkin. “Figured you deserved something sweet. Even in a tomb of paper.”
I laughed once, too quickly, and blinked against the sting behind my eyes. Then I turned back to the screen.
“Let’s see what the bastard wrote.”
The first page crackled slightly under the cursor as Gentry scrolled. The digital copy preserved every flaw of the original—creases, ink stains, the faint ghost of a pressed flower long rotted to shadow.
Gentry leaned back in his chair, boot crossed over his knee, fingers steepled as he watched the screen load the next set of digitized entries.
“It’s dated 1571,” he said quietly.
I nodded, heart pacing slower than it should have. My fingers itched to turn a page, though there were none—only soft clicks of the mouse as Gentry scrolled down the screen.
Alban Stanton’s handwriting was neat, if a bit stiff, the ink faded to a russet brown.
3rd March, in the Year of our Lord 1571
The air did bite bitter this morning, though spring creeps close. I met with Father at the lower fields to survey the eastern fence, and found it near half-fallen from the frost. He growls oft these days. Says I must wed before Michaelmas. My mother, God rest her, would have urged the same.
Later, at the vicar’s supper, I chanced to sit near the apothecary’s daughter—Alice. Green of eye and sharp of tongue. When I asked if she might walk with me to the green come Sunday, she said I had the look of a man who’d ask three women in one day and remember none of their names.
I snorted softly.
Gentry grinned. “Sounds like your kind of woman.”
He clicked to the next entry.
11th March, 1571
She turned me away again. I cannot say I am surprised, though I thought the violets might soften her. They did not. Instead she sent me to the Widow Bramley with a poultice for the gout, and told me to mind my pride lest I trip over it.
