Divorced by Dawn, Queen by Dusk — Book Two: The Blood Crown
Chapter Nine: The 1887 Charter
Arthur brought the document to the estate the next morning. Not a copy — the original, in a preservation case that he set on the kitchen table with the careful reverence of someone handling something that had been waiting for this moment for a hundred and thirty-seven years.
The document was browning at the edges and the ink had faded in places to a pale brown that required reading at an angle in good light. The main text was legible — standard legal language from 1887, dense and precise in the way legal documents were before lawyers learned brevity. The margin notes were smaller and more difficult, written in the hand of someone who had been thinking quickly or thinking laterally, additions that
