That doesn’t make the claim true.” Catherine closed the register quickly when footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Mrs.
Fenwick stood at the door and coughed twice, their agreed warning.
Richard’s voice traveled through the hall as he questioned a servant about Catherine’s whereabouts.
Mrs.
Fenwick stepped out to meet him.
“Your wife asked me to fetch the old nursery blanket,” she said.
Richard demanded why anyone would disturb the room.
“She was feeling poorly after the doctor left.” His footsteps receded, but Catherine remained rigid until the sounds faded.
She looked at Elijah.
“If I take this to a magistrate, will they believe me?” Elijah did not answer at once.
“The men who profit from that book may know the magistrate,” he said.
“And the people whose names were changed have no reason to trust a hearing they cannot attend safely.” Catherine considered that.
For years she had treated official seals as proof of fairness, never asking whose words were allowed to appear beneath them.
“Then we need witnesses,” she said.
“We need the people named in it.”
Elijah placed the register inside a false-bottomed toolbox of his own making.
He did not tell Catherine where he would hide it.
She accepted the decision, though the trust troubled her.
“I want to find Lydia,” she said.
Elijah looked toward the register.
“I want those children to be found, too.” Catherine nodded slowly.
“If my sister lived to expose this, I have no right to make her story only about my grief.” For the first time that day Elijah saw the outline of an ally, not because Catherine promised sympathy, but because she had admitted the limits of what her sympathy could repair.
Chapter 10: A Child Called James
That evening a freight wagon arrived carrying sacks of corn and an unfamiliar young boy.
The driver claimed the child had been apprenticed to a miller and would now work at Riverbend.
Elijah recognized him from the nursery register: James Bell, age nine, though the thin shoulders made him look younger.
The boy’s sleeve was torn near the elbow, and his wrists bore marks from a cord.
He did not lift his eyes when Crowe ordered him down.
Richard called him “new property” and instructed the kitchen to feed him before the wagon left again at dawn.
Naomi carried a bowl of stew to the storage room where James was kept under watch.
She knelt beside him and asked whether he knew his mother’s name.
The boy whispered “Sarah Bell.” Naomi felt her breath catch.
