I'm standing at the back of a print shop, and I already know this is my husband's trade. The front of the shop is newspapers and pamphlets, stacked and drying. The back is where the real work happens: a hidden hollow under the floor, behind the crates, where we keep the books that aren't supposed to exist yet. Medical texts, smuggled in from the mainland. Anatomy. The kind of knowledge the Church and the College of Physicians didn't want loose in Scotland.
I bring my husband a note. He reads it, then tears it to shreds before I've finished watching, and gives me a look that says we both understand why. Some knowledge is dangerous to hold onto once it's been read.
The books go to a man the town calls mad. He isn't. He's a physician who's decided medicine and religion don't have to explain the same things, and for that alone the other doctors won't sit with him. He works alone, in a basement lab under one of the big houses at the edge of town: vials, roots, dead things, distillation. I don't understand half of what he's doing when I first bring him the anatomy books. But I keep coming back.
It starts as errands. I bring him what he asks for. Then I start bringing him more than he asked for: botanicals I find on my own trips to the mainland markets, roots and barks I've read about in the books I've also started reading myself. I take notes. I ask questions. Over years, without ever meaning to become anything like a doctor myself, I become the one who remembers what he's tried, what worked, what he said about why. I write all of it down. Pages and pages, more than any one book can hold.
When he's old, and I can feel there isn't much time left, I go back through everything I've recorded, not in the order I wrote it, but by what belongs together, root with root, symptom with symptom, and I start organizing his life's work into something a person could actually use. It's slow. Some of it has to be rewritten. Most of it just needs to be found again and put next to its match. By the time he dies, the shape of the books is already set. What's left is finishing them and, through our own print shop, actually printing them.
At first almost no one wants them. The physicians reject them outright: this wasn't proper medicine, in their eyes, it was a printer's wife's scribbles. But people find them anyway. Regular people, who'd been let down by what the official doctors could offer, start buying them, using them, healing with them. It's illegal for a while. There's real trouble with the law over it. And then, slowly, even the law changes, and even the physicians start asking for copies. The income that comes from it changes our lives. But that was never the reason I started.
MessageNone of this began as an ambition to write a book, or to be known for anything. It began as curiosity about someone else's work, and a habit of writing things down so the knowledge wouldn't be lost. Then it became organizing what I'd gathered so it made sense and could be found again. Only after that did it become something that could stand on its own and reach people who'd never meet the man it came from.
What I keep noticing is the order those things happened in. Curiosity first. Then cataloging. Then rearranging what's scattered into something coherent. Only at the very end does the work take on a purpose of its own, usually a bigger one than whoever started it ever intended. And the knowledge that mattered most was, more than once, the knowledge someone else had decided wasn't safe to say out loud yet.
That's the same shape I recognize in what I'm doing now. I didn't sit down to write a book, either. I was reading, researching, decoding what had been hidden or dismissed, and writing it down so it wouldn't be lost, and only afterward did it become the Decoder Series.
