Chapter 33

The air hung heavy with anticipation, as if the house itself was holding its breath. Waiting, watching.

With every determined step through the shadowed halls, Ivy's nerves grew stronger, though Ralph insisted on walking in front of her, stopping at every little sound, making sure that it was safe before proceeding. Signs of the fire were everywhere: the beautiful tapestries were singed and sooty, the windows shattered. But she hardly noticed. There was a gaping chasm in her heart; seeing the story of her life disappear in front of her should have been freeing, after all, it no longer belonged to the library. But all she felt was a numbing sense of loss, that there were memories and entire chapters of her life that were never coming back.

They did not have to search long. As soon as they reached the front hall, they came upon a group of about two dozen or so men gathered around something, their backs to Ivy and Ralph. There was a strained hush to the group, and the electric lights had been turned off, in their place hundreds of glowing candles lining every surface and step. Occasionally a gust of wind would come through one of the holes in the roof still gaping from the fire, sending the flames flickering sideways and casting strange shadows.

Beside her, Ivy could feel Ralph tensing, as he reached for her hand. Using the deep shadows as cover, they slipped unnoticed behind the men, then up the stairs to the gallery where they could look down from the safety of the marble balustrades. They huddled like two soldiers in a trench, conferring in whispers about going over the top.

"What's your plan?" Ralph asked her. "I assume you have one?"

"We need to tell Arthur that the pact has been broken, that the monk is gone. He'll have no choice but to leave Blackwood. My book was erased and the monk is dead. Well, more dead," she amended as she tried to see what it was that had the men so captivated below them. "What are they doing, I wonder?"

"Stay here," Ralph ordered as he started to stand.

Ivy pulled him back down by the arm. "What? Where are you going?"

"I'm going to go tell Arthur that it's over. To go home. That's what you want, isn't it?"

It all felt so anticlimactic, so simple. All Ivy wanted to do was curl up somewhere safe, feel a hot cup of tea in her hands, know that all of this was behind her.

"I'm coming with you," she told him. She was prepared to argue, to press her case for being the one to send Arthur on his way, but Ralph wasn't listening. "Ralph?"

He was half-crouched, his knuckles white as he grasped the banister, looking at the scene below them. There had been a shift in the atmosphere, a hum of excited expectation rising from the group. "Don't look, Ivy," Ralph said, his voice dangerously low.

"What is it?" She started to stand, but he pushed her away with surprising force, causing her to stumble back further into the hall. "Ralph!"

"Stay here."

"I will not!"

"Ivy, you are not to go down there. I forbid it."

"You can't forbid me from anything!" Her voice rose as she realized that her chance to set everything to rights was slipping through her fingers, simply because Ralph felt the need to assert his masculine ego.

In the time it took Ivy to blink, Ralph was in front of her, holding her by the shoulders and glaring at her through the murky dark. "I know you enjoy being contrary, but I am not about to watch you get your bloody head blown off."

Something in his tone snapped her from her adamancy, and she finally noticed the fear flaring in his eyes, the way his fingers were shaking as they dug into her shoulders. Whatever was happening in the hall had rattled him, badly.

She nodded, and he released her.

"Good. Stay here, and don't look. I'll be back."

Ivy watched as Ralph headed for the stairs, fighting the urge to reach out and keep him with her in the cold darkness. Crawling on her hands and knees, she approached the gallery and peeked through the marble balustrades. There was no harm in watching. She hadn't come this far and undergone every nightmare imaginable just to sit back and hope that Ralph sent everyone home with a polite please and thank-you.

But as she stared down, she wished maybe she had listened to Ralph after all, and stayed put. There should have been little left to shock her after what she had experienced, yet all the same, as she stared down at the scene below her, she felt as if she was witnessing some strange waking dream unfold.

A stone pool had been brought into the hall—lord only knew how, it looked like one of the huge fountains found in a London park—and the men stood around it, transfixed. It was a strange sort of baptism, with Arthur standing in a white robe in the center, hands clasped in prayer before him. For it was not water that came up to his knees, billowing the robe out around him—it was blood.

Where had the blood come from? It was so much blood, more than simply that of a slaughtered cow or pig. Bile rose in Ivy's stomach, the antiseptic smell of hospitals rushing back to her. Blood slicking the hallways, men missing limbs, the putrid stink of flesh rotting on the bone. The blood in that pool was human, she was sure of it. She knew it just as sure as if she had read it in a book, because she had. Arthur was recreating the illustrations from the manuscript, bringing the bizarre rituals to life. A cry escaped her throat.

Arthur snapped around at the sound of her voice, then looked up. The candles lit him from the back, casting him in a halo of light, illuminating the shape of his body through the white robe. Yet he looked like nothing so much as a young boy, wading ever deeper into a dangerous current at the jeering encouragement of his friends.

"Ivy," he said, his face blank. "You shouldn't be here."

Movement out of the corner of her eye. Lord Mabry was conferring with another man in harsh whispers, pointing up at them.

Ralph had doubled back at her outburst and was gripping her arm, almost to the point of bruising. "I'll deal with this. Go back to the cottage."

"Isn't this why we're here?" she retorted. "I can end this now."

"Not if it costs you your life," Ralph hissed, tightening his grasp.

"Lady Hayworth," Lord Mabry said, as he began the slow ascent up the stairs, one of his men close behind. "You are a slippery one, aren't you?"

Ivy wrestled her arm free. On one side was Ralph, all restless, dangerous energy, and closing in on the other, Lord Mabry.

"It's over, Arthur," she called, slipping from Ralph's grasp and skirting round the edge of the gallery, putting more distance between her and Lord Mabry. "The manuscript doesn't hold any power anymore, or the library. The monk is dead, gone. Whatever you are trying to do, it won't work."

"It's never over," he responded. He appeared cool and determined, but there was a slight tremor in his voice. "It can go on forever. We are eternity. If the monk is gone, even better. It means that the library is ready for a new master. My father thinks that it could be me."

"You don't really believe that, do you? What has your father ever done for you? What do you have to gain from this? Please, come out," she begged. Arthur had betrayed her in every sense possible, treated her like a child, a prisoner, a sacrificial lamb. But under the bravado and hard veneer was a scared little boy who wanted to please his father.

There was the faintest ripple in the blood as his body swayed, but then he set his jaw, shaking his head. "This is for the glory of the Sphinxes, of the Crown. Britain can once again take her rightful place as the greatest empire in the world, but first we must make sacrifices."

Lord Mabry's man—big, with a crooked nose and bulging neck muscles—had reached the top of the stairs, and made a clumsy lunge at her.

Running along the railing, Ivy easily evaded the advance, Ralph intercepting him instead. Behind her she heard a fist connect with meaty flesh. She prayed it was Ralph who had landed the blow. "It won't work! It's over, truly over," Ivy called down. "The curse is broken."

"You're trying to deceive me," Arthur said darkly. "My father was right about you."

"What do you think this will achieve? Nothing good can come of this."

"What will it achieve?" He let out a laugh, a delighted, if not manic, sound. "Why, everything! Eternal life, the rejuvenation of broken bodies, the ability to amass knowledge unlike anything man has ever seen."

It all happened so quickly. One moment Arthur was looking up, past her, as if searching for some unknowable sign in the stars just visible through the damaged roof. Then his body was tensing, and with a gurgling plunge, he was under the surface.

Darting down the opposite staircase, Ivy rushed to the fountain. "Arthur!" She lunged, grasping for fingertips still just visible above the blood, but one of the men had caught up to her, pulling her back by the waist.

A hush fell over the hall, even Ivy going still as she watched. A handful of weak bubbles peppered the surface, spreading in rings.

She measured the ensuing silence in the rise and fall of her own chest. One breath, two breaths, three breaths...even if Arthur were to hold his breath, by now he would have been forced to come up for air. But his body did not resurface, and he stayed below, drowned in the elixir of life.

The man holding her had loosened his grip as he watched everything unfold, but Ivy was likewise too transfixed to try to run.

"You killed your son," she let out in a choke when the last bubble had burst. Lord Mabry had come to stand on the other side, staring stone-faced at the pool. "You killed your own son, you monster! And you just stand there!"

The remaining Sphinxes exchanged glances, cleared throats. Some wore expressions of shock, others of polite embarrassment, as if they had not actually expected something so vulgar to occur. An acrid breeze swept through the hall, candles guttering in its wake. Nothing else happened: no grand celestial event, no light bursting forth from the fountain, no heavenly chorus of angels.

Lord Mabry finally dragged his gaze from the blood fountain and met Ivy's eye. He looked old, the bags under his eyes more pronounced, the corners of his mouth drooping into what might have been a frown or a grimace, or just age. There were thousands of fathers in England who had lost sons, but none looked as utterly beaten down as the old general did in that moment. She thought he might be in shock, the reality of what had just occurred belatedly setting in, but then he was reaching into his waistcoat pocket, drawing out a gun.

"I can't risk you going to the authorities," he said, leveling the pistol at her. Her captor immediately stepped away, releasing her so that her only bond was the threat of a bullet tearing through her flesh.

"But you are the authorities," she said. She didn't know all of the men who comprised the secret society, but she knew that most of them were wealthy aristocrats, and wielded power both in Parliament and among the nobility. No officer or barrister would dare to go against them.

"There will be questions," one of the Sphinxes said. "She's a lady, and her death would draw undue attention."

Ivy's eyes darted to where Ralph was standing. He was looking past her, eyes locked on the pistol trembling in Lord Mabry's liver-spotted hands. "Ralph?"

He stood still as a statue, his eyes glazed as if witnessing something only he could see, throat working compulsively. At his side, his fingers twitched. He looked young, scared.

"Never mind him," the general sneered. "He's war-addled."

Ivy dragged her attention back to where the argument over her life was raging.

"We can't let her go free. It will be over for us," another man countered.

"Then put her in the cell. Let her live out her days there. The love of her life died and she went mad, became a recluse. It's an easy enough story to peddle," Sir Alfred said.

The pistol wavered in Lord Mabry's hand and Ivy held her breath. She should run, at least try to make an escape, but she found herself rooted to the ground, unable to tear her gaze away from the pool lest Arthur miraculously resurface.

"You truly are a credit to your father's legacy," Lord Mabry said, thoughtful. "I always felt badly that we had to see him removed from his position at Cambridge, but it wouldn't do to have the manuscript fall into the hands of someone like him, someone who didn't understand it the way we did. He got close several times, even going so far as to correspond with his cousin, the late Lord Hayworth. Can you imagine the damage they could have done? It would have been the end of a dynasty, the waste of the culmination of centuries' worth of knowledge."

"You...you knew my father?"

"I wouldn't say that exactly, but I knew enough to see that he had to be stopped. I was only too glad when I learned that he'd enlisted and would no longer prove a threat to us."

The smell of blood filled Ivy's nostrils, her lungs, her very being. Her father's demise, her mother's broken heart and subsequent decline, it had all stemmed from this man and his obsession with the manuscript. She was frozen in a moment in war where a soldier must decide if he is to stay in a foxhole, or take his chance going over the top. Ivy's vision narrowed to the pistol, a dangerous glimmer of metal in the candlelight.

No one was expecting it, least of all her. Lunging forward, she hurtled her body into the old man, knocking him off balance and sending the pistol clattering to the floor. She snatched it up, scrambling to her feet and pointing it at Lord Mabry with trembling hands.

"Put the gun down, girl," Lord Mabry instructed.

She felt light-headed and far away from her body, as if she was still on the gallery looking down at herself. "The blood," she said, gesturing with the gun to the fountain. "Where did the blood come from?"

The old man's lips tightened. "How should I know? Arthur was responsible for all that."

She swung around in a wide arc, men shrinking back as the gun passed over them. "Where is the blood from?" she demanded before turning the pistol back on their leader.

"I—I believe there was a girl, a maid," a thin man in wire-rimmed spectacles volunteered in a shaky voice.

She closed her eyes. Agnes. All this time, Agnes had been dead, and Ivy had been none the wiser. Had they imprisoned the girl, keeping her alive until just before the ritual? Had it been fast, a merciful killing? Or had they drained the blood from her in a slow, steady stream while she was still alive? Bile rose in Ivy's stomach, acid filling her mouth. But it was so much blood, more than from just one person, surely. "Who else."

Several of the men exchanged looks. "Pigs, my lady. When it became clear that it...that it wasn't enough, we—"

"Stop." She wavered on her feet, tightening her grip on the smooth pistol handle. "You killed Agnes, an innocent girl. And for what?"

"How little you understand," Lord Mabry said, unrattled by the pistol trained on him. "Men die by thousands in war for the greater good. What is one girl when it is for the good of our nation? Our race? You think of only what you see before you, of the present moment. But I see the larger picture, a world where war can be fought on paper instead of distant battlefields. How many people did you lose to the war? Would you deny the mothers of the future their children's lives?" The earl's long face twisted in a sneer. "Of course not. You are selfish and small-minded. This is why someone of your station is unfit to hold a title, to be responsible for the purity of English blood. You were a means to an end, but I was never pleased about my son taking a wife from the gutter."

She was going to kill him. Ivy's finger tightened on the trigger, the cool metal inviting her to release all her anger and rage. Was this how James and her father had felt on the battlefield? What a terrible burden to hold a man's life in the balance, even if the man was evil incarnate. The rush of power shamed her, yet her heart beat fast, her finger tightening on the trigger. Memories, hidden ones that she had always kept close to her heart, smoldered and flared like lightning striking a tree.

James, crouching at the edge of the pond in Regent's Park, crooked grin on his face as he watched the ducks and geese. Too young to die.

Tightening.

Her father, spectacles askew as he held her on his knee, showing her the manuscript he was working on. The world robbed of a great mind, a loving man.

Tightening.

Her mother, kind and generous and warm, who could fill a grimy London flat with music more beautiful than any orchestra, lying in a hospital bed, unable to afford a doctor who cared enough to try to save her.

Tightening.

Ivy Radcliffe, no longer a girl, but not quite a woman yet. Alone in the world, without a purpose or a place, forced to find her way without the love of her family.

Pulling.