Chapter 130

The paper Nana lined her cake tins with came in a roll, brown and a little waxy, and smelled faintly of every cake that had ever been near it. I tore off a length against the edge of the table, as Nana did, and weighted the curling ends with the salt box and the rose tin.

Caspian did not offer to fetch ink. He sat at the far end of the table and let me find it myself, in the drawer under the petition book, where Quill had left his second-best pen and a pot of black.

I trimmed the pen. I had not trimmed a pen in Nana’s kitchen since I was twenty and new to this house. My hands remembered it before I did.

“I’ll write,” I said. “You’ll read every line before the next one. If you want a word changed, say so before it dries.”

“Yes.”

“And you sit there.”

“I’m sitting here,” he said.

***

At the head of the paper I wrote nothing grand. No title, no names. A copyist knows that the heading is where people lie first.

One.

I sto