Chapter 30

The library doors stood ajar like two crooked teeth, welcoming Ivy inside with a sinister leer. She picked her way over the debris with soft steps, her feet stinging from her journey across the grounds. Burnt rubble sat smoldering in piles in the dark hall, but aside from some smoke stains and the occasional fallen timber, the walls stood intact. Mrs. Hewitt had been right—Blackwood had withstood worse before, and it would be standing long after this.

With footsteps made hesitant by a deep sense of foreboding, Ivy gingerly pushed open the creaking doors the rest of the way and slipped into the library. It was dark. A drifting flake of ash landed on her hair and she flinched before swatting it away. As she moved slowly along the shelves, a long-forgotten song came back to her on threads and tattered moth wings. It was a medieval tune, and though she couldn't remember how she knew it, the meaning was clear as crystal. People had once believed that when one died, their soul must make a perilous journey over the course of a single night, avoiding demons and darkness, before eventually reaching the safehold of Jesus's arms. This ae nighte, rang the dark and mysterious refrain. Ivy was a lost soul without the anchors of memory and hope, adrift in the night, unsure of what morning would bring.

Somewhere in the bowels of the house, Ralph was hunting for her lost notes, vulnerable and alone. How would he be able to outrun Arthur or his servants in his state if they came upon him? Would they hurt him, even if he claimed he was a Hewitt as Mrs. Hewitt had instructed? It was no use dwelling on what-ifs and worst-case scenarios; Ivy would either find the books she needed and Ralph would find her notes and together they would rein in the Sphinxes and the manuscript, or Arthur and his club would continue to wreak havoc on the abbey and what was left of Ivy's life.

The predawn light glowing from the window was just enough to make out the murky outline of shelves and tables haphazardly pushed out of the way in the aftermath of the fire. Ivy didn't know what she was looking for, other than an astronomy book that might shed some light on the riddle of the constellations in the flowers.

"What are you hiding?" Ivy murmured into the darkness.

The lingering smell of smoke hung heavy in the air as she slowly made her way forward. Her step stopped as a glowing ember leapt from a pile of ash. But as she jumped to beat it out, it rose up higher in front of her, not in the erratic pattern of a rogue ember, but the intentional movement of a sentient being. No bigger than an apple, it glowed rosy gold, casting the shelves behind it in flickering shadows. Ivy watched as the light rose higher still, bobbing and floating like the disembodied flame of a lantern being held aloft by some unseen hand.

Her eyes were playing tricks on her. Exhaustion had finally overtaken her, and she was hallucinating, dreaming. Yet all the same, she moved toward the light, drawn like a hungry street cat to a warm bowl of milk. It wanted Ivy to follow, and in her dreamlike state, it only made sense that she would oblige.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

—Every nighte and alle,

Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,

And Christe receive thy saule.

Was this the end for her, the culmination of her soul's journey? She probably should have been scared, or at the very least, wary. But when one was kicking aside the burnt rubble of an evil library that stole memories, well, she could only muster curiosity and a reluctant sense of acceptance.

She was tired, so tired. But forcing her weary feet through the debris, Ivy followed the light. It would stop, hovering and bobbing as if waiting, and then dart ahead, deeper into the shelves.

For all the damage wrought by the fire and water used to put it out, the books were remarkably unharmed. Shelves had collapsed, and the red velvet drapes were nothing more than threadbare shrouds, but the worst damage to a book seemed to be some singed corners and spines strained from falling to the floor.

The light stopped, gently bobbing in place, in front of a shelf where most of the books remained untouched by smoke or water damage. It looked as if until recently the shelf had been flush against the wall, but was now pulled aside, revealing another row of books behind it. Even in the surreal landscape of the fire-damaged library, Ivy was certain she had never seen this shelf before. The light drifted closer to the books, illuminating the spine of a simply-bound tome before circling back to her. It was so close that she could have reached out and touched the glowing orb if she had been brave enough. Then it flickered, and vanished, leaving her in the stillness of the library.

Outside, a chaffinch sang its first morning song, a flippant trill that cared nothing for the horrors of the previous night. Ivy had come looking for an astronomy book, but this seemed more important now, so with one last lingering glance for the orb, she pulled down the book.

It took her a moment, her eyes blinking against the poor light, trying to make sense of the words that stared back at her. When they did come into focus, her breath caught in her throat.

The Life and Dreams of Ivy Radcliffe, the Lady Hayworth. 1903—

The book fell from her hands as she stumbled backward, tripping on a charred beam. Something sharp dug into her back, but the pain was far away and inconsequential. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, sure that this was a result of too little sleep and nerves stretched to fraying. But her name stared back at her, the year of her birth and everything between then and now trapped in a simple little hyphen.

The library turned inward eyes on her, the shelves pressing in around her. She should go, run back to the cottage and drink tea with the Hewitts. They had warned her about the library, its insatiable hunger for stories and memories, but seeing evidence of it in black and white was another thing entirely.

Her curiosity turned morbid. With shaking hands, Ivy fished the book out from the pile of rubble where she had dropped it, and, crouching near the window, she read by the light of the gray dawn.

Her hands were trembling so badly that it took her three tries to open the book and flip to the first page. There was no author, no publisher's address, just a chapter heading then dense blocks of text.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to read.

The book knew everything. It detailed her early life, the small flat in which she'd lived as a child when her father taught at Cambridge, then the squalor of the East End after he'd lost his job. The courtyard children who had first mocked Ivy for her love of books, then had begged her to tell them the stories inside the covers when their curiosity had gotten the better of them. It told of her and James's exploits playing Swiss Family Robinson. There were moments in her early life that she had completely forgotten, her first memories of her parents. She is a darling baby, and her doting parents cannot help but watch her even as she sleeps. The whole world waits for her, but for now she is content at her mother's breast... Her mother smells of warm milk and talcum powder, the sweetest smells in the world to little Ivy. Unable to see through the tears gathering in her eyes, Ivy flipped ahead to a random page and forced herself to read the words that awaited her.

"Well, I was telling thee the story of the Mad Monk. Everyone in Blackwood has grown up hearing it."

The familiar feeling grows stronger, but it is still fuzzy and indistinct. Ivy nods that Agnes should go on, though a peculiar fear has begun to take shape deep in her gut.

Outside the rain pelts against the windows in unforgiving sheets, the wind groaning. "It was in the days when Blackwood Abbey was a real abbey, a monastery, with monks and priests and the like living here," Agnes says. "There was a monk—no one knows what his name was—that was obsessed with...what is it called? When metal turns into gold?"

"Alchemy," Ivy murmurs.

"—that's it. Anyway, he began to take up darker interests. Things like life and death, and how it was that dead things could come back again. Said there was a fountain of youth, but instead of water springing from it, it was the blood of virgins. He did experiments, terrible experiments, and recorded everything in a great big book. There was girls that went missing from the town, and even though there was lots of accusations brought against him, nothing was ever proved...

"When King Henry came 'round to burn all the monasteries, the monk disappeared. Some people say he was bricked up alive in the walls somewhere, but most people think that he ran off and went to Italy. The one thing everyone agrees on is that he hid the book somewhere in the abbey, and that his spirit haunts Blackwood, guarding his book and its power, hoping for someone to find it and release him from the bonds of death."

Ivy digests this. Agnes is a good storyteller, and the vivid details make it feel familiar. But it would be quite a stretch to say that she's heard it before—twice.

"You really don't remember?"

The book went slack in her hands then fell to the floor, and she balled her fists against her eyes, rubbing away the imprint of the words on her eyelids. The conversation came flooding back, not just that one, but every iteration of it. This was a trick, a joke. Someone in the house was eavesdropping on her, writing everything down. But no, the passage knew not only what she had been saying, but her thoughts as well. Were they really her thoughts though? What did she remember, and what was a dream, or even an invention of this anonymous author?

Picking up the book as if it were a hot coal, Ivy forced herself to flip ahead.

Ivy stumbles going up the stairs and accepts Ralph's hand, heart pumping fast and hard. She has seen the way he looks at her, the possessive yet yearning glint in his eye. It frightens and excites her, and she wants to see where that look will lead next. She is rewarded with a light kiss, which soon deepens and leaves her legs wobbling and core aching. She craves Ralph with a burning want that she can't quite name. Needs to be closer to him, needs more of him.

But he pulls away, breathing hard, his eyes glassy and dangerous. "We can't do this again," he tells her. He is fingering the gold ring on her finger. Is it her wedding band, or her old false ring, meant to deter the attention of men?

Ivy reaches for Ralph, her fingers closing greedily on the open collar of his shirt. "Why not? If it's about my title, my position, then I don't care. No one expects conventionality from me. They already think I'm an outsider, a pretender."

He shakes his head. "That's not what I mean."

Despite her protests, he gently unhooks her fingers and strides away, back to the stables.

Ivy put the book down. Something hot and throbbing unspooled low in her belly. Wanting, aching. Whatever was on the page had never occurred in real life, yet she could almost smell Ralph's scent of warm leather, feel the taut muscles of his chest beneath her fingers. Were these unfulfilled wishes and fantasies? Could the library read her every desire, know things about her that even she didn't know herself?

A yawn overtook her despite herself. Outside, a smoky pink was beginning to touch the edges of the gray dawn. As she warred with herself to keep reading, her eyes grew heavier. With sleep would come more loss, more forgetting. But her body demanded it, and she could no longer fight the inevitable. Perhaps this was what dying soldiers felt on the battlefield, the helpless resignation that once they closed their eyes and succumbed to the darkness, it was all over. But close their eyes they did, and Ivy likewise surrendered to the dark unknown.