“Jade Tarnno is a female minstrel I’ll be adding to the book,” Bob said, improvising madly. “She has green eyes and black hair as straight as a waterfall. Her lover is a jongleur named Ken Pipem. Ken is always masked because he’s hiding his leprosy.” Behind his hand, he stifled a burp. “Ken wears a mask to hide his deformed nose, and the fingers of his left glove are stuffed with horsehair to hide the fact that two are missing.”

As Bob frantically lied to save himself, Jade Tarnno and Ken Pipem took shape in his imagination. Took shape and then broke out of the mold. They were no longer flat characters he’d just made up.

Instead, it felt like he was describing people who already existed. Like he was watching a movie and simply describing what he saw.

This vision was also informed by his years of research. In medieval times there had been more than two thousand leper colonies in France alone. The Sunday after the leper was diagnosed, he was dressed in a shroud and brought to church on a litter carried by four priests singing psalms. Once inside, he was set down a safe distance from the congregation. After the service for the dead was read, the priests carried him out of town to the leper colony. He was given a bell or a pair of castanets to warn others of his presence. And he could never again enter a church, a mill, a market, or any place where others gathered. He could not bathe himself nor wash his clothes in stream nor spring. If anyone spoke to him on the road, he could not answer until he was downwind.

Derrick interrupted Bob’s thoughts. “How come leprosy was a thing back then but it’s not now?”

“Red squirrels can carry leprosy, and at the time there was a huge trade in both red squirrel meat and fur. There is a theory that’s how it spread. And now we have antibiotics that can cure it.”

This was all true. But it was also false, meant to lull Derrick.

The boy nodded. “I’ll email her today. How long do you think it will take her to answer?”

If Bridget didn’t understand it, he didn’t need Derrick immediately seeing a puzzled reply and figuring out what Bob had done. “I’m asking for a lot of research, so no point in checking back for at least a few days.”

After Derrick left, Bob kept thinking about the letter. Not about whether Bridget might decipher his hidden messages, but about the false words hiding the true ones. What if familial relationships in the kingdom were more tangled than he’d depicted? Readers ate that stuff up. He’d definitely add them to the version he was writing for Derrick.