Chapter 26

The bed was shaking.

Ivy bolted upright. The whole room was shaking; pictures on the walls rattling in their frames, and the cloying scent of incense choking the air.

She had hardly regained her balance when the door opened, and a servant deposited her tray along with an envelope of neatly transcribed papers on the small writing table.

"Did you feel that?" Ivy asked, grabbing at the old woman's hand. "And the incense—can you smell it? Surely you realize that something is wrong, that I must be let out!"

The woman shrank back. "I know nowt 'bout it, m'lady," she said, snatching her hand back. The door slammed shut and locked behind her.

Sighing, Ivy sat down at the table and fingered the thin envelope. Was this the entire thing? Arthur had only had a night to do the transcribing, so he must have just given her part of it. She sat with the envelope in her lap, turning it over and over in her hands. How much of the manuscript's power lay in these pages? If she opened them, would something terrible happen?

She had little choice in the matter. Beyond the walls of her room, the Sphinxes were consolidating power. Dumping the envelope out on the bed, Ivy frowned at the sparse pages of text. Of course Arthur wouldn't have trusted her with the entire manuscript, even if he'd had time to transcribe it all.

As she'd expected, it wasn't Latin. Arthur would have been able to read it if it was, as well as Italian, French, German, and any other number of languages a young man of his station would have studied. The characters were uniform and flowed neatly, though they didn't look like any language Ivy had ever encountered. If there had been illustrations, the text would only be half the story without the accompanying pictures. Maybe Arthur simply hadn't felt up to the challenge of copying the pictures, or else was afraid that they would give her too much information.

Yet the strange text tugged and pulled at her, inviting her to sink into the pages and swim through the unfamiliar characters. The sun rose and sank again, her tray collected and refreshed for dinner. Her room had grown stale, but this manuscript was a portal, not just to the outside world, but to an entirely different plane of knowledge altogether. If only she could read it. Rubbing a crick from her neck, Ivy set the papers down and closed her eyes. Would her father have been able to decipher it?

Though her father's features had grown vague—no more than an impression of a kindly face and gentle brown eyes—their evening lessons still stood out in her mind, as fresh and sharp as the ink on the page before her. Why the library drained her of some memories and left her with others was a mystery. Perhaps some memories were so ingrained in bones and blood that they were beyond the leeching powers of the hungry library.

As she scanned the rows of Arthur's neat cursive, Ivy's resolve began to waver. Even if she was somehow able to decipher it, then what? There would be no sense of elation, no triumph in the hard-won task. At best she might be able to bargain for the servants' freedom, but she wasn't even optimistic about that.

When Arthur came that evening to check on her progress, she was no closer to making sense of the text than when she'd first opened the envelope.

"It's either encrypted, or in a completely dead language," she told Arthur before he had a chance to ask.

Irritation flashed across his face as he stalked over to the little table and bent over the papers. "I knew that much. I thought that you might have at least come across something similar while helping your father."

She shook her head. Why was she frustrated with herself when her success would only help Arthur? She decided to take a gamble. "There are illustrations in the original manuscript, yes?" she asked. "Strange ones. Flowers that don't exist, women performing bizarre rituals."

He put down the papers. "How did you know that?" Then, "Why, you little minx. You've seen it, haven't you?"

"Only once, and very briefly." He didn't need to know that her memories of the manuscript were clouded, indistinguishable from her dreams and what Mrs. Hewitt had told her.

Arthur laughed, though it was a harsh, unpleasant sound. He looked no better than he had the day before. If anything, he was more haggard, with another day's worth of growth on his jaw, darker circles under his eyes. "Oh, my clever darling. Yes, there are illustrations. I'm afraid my transcribing skills end at text though."

She worried her lip. "I think I can crack it, but I need the illustrations. They'll provide context, and they may even contain a cipher needed to unlock it."

Arthur stood. "I'll think about it. In the meantime, get some sleep, and please do eat. We need you healthy and rested if you're to be of use."