Chương 193: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-THREE: THE STOREROOM

He found Denise Okonkwo in the storeroom again on the fourth day, and this time he did not go out. She had a slate and was counting rolled bandage. She heard him and did not turn round.

"You know who I am," he said.

"Yes."

"You have not come to see me."

"No." Bertrand stood in the door. There was one stool and she was not on it.

"I advised the court to let you live," he said. Denise put a mark on the slate.

"I am aware that is not a thing a person says," Bertrand said, "and I said it anyway, and now we are both in a storeroom with it." She turned round.

"Eleven years I was outside your walls," she said. Her dialect was worse than her English but she used it anyway.

"Four miles. You never came."

"No." Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"People walked past your gate to get to me. Past it."

"Yes."

"Why?" Bertrand did not answer straight away.

"There's a fee," he said.

"I know about the fee."

"The fee is set by the diocese and it is not mine to set and I have written twice in thirty-three years asking for it to be lowered and both times I did not write again when I was refused." He stopped.

"That is the whole of my defence and I have been assembling it for six months and it is four sentences long." Denise put the slate down on a crate.

"Say the number," she said.

"What number?"

"How many died. Between your gate and my door. In eleven years."

"I don't know."

"Guess."

"I will not guess," Bertrand said.

"I would guess low. Every man guesses low about that." Denise looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked the slate back up.

"I don't have anything for you," she said.

"I want to. There's a thing I'm supposed to say here and I can feel the shape of it and I'm not going to say it."

"No."

"You want to be told it wasn't only you."

"Yes."

"It wasn't only you," Denise said.

"That's not the same as it not being you." She made another mark.

"Ninety-one rolls. Come back when you've done something." Bertrand stood there a second.

"Physician," he said.

"Don't."

"You are the first person in thirty-three years to speak to me like that and I have been starving," Bertrand said, and left. He came to Okafor that night, before he rode.

"The fee," he said.

"I heard."

"I am going to write to the diocese a third time. I do not expect to succeed." He put a folded sheet on her table.

"That is a list of every household in my township I know cannot pay it. It is one hundred and forty names and I have never written it down before because writing it down obliges a man." Okafor did not pick it up.

"What do you want me to do with it?"

"Nothing," Bertrand said.

"I wanted it to exist somewhere I cannot burn it."