Page 52 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

Arthur finally left her, the sound of his receding footsteps growing quieter until the house settled back into its prevailing laconism. Slumping against the door, Ivy let her tired eyes close.

The weak sun was dipping low, gray clouds gathering out the window. How long would it take for the library to drain her? And what had it already taken from her? With Susan gone, there was no one else to come looking for Ivy. She would slowly rot here, her mind turning to dust, and the only legacy she would leave behind was a vague impression of a woman who once was. Arthur was all but giving her a key to escape, and all she had to do was fit it to the lock. But if the greatest minds in the country couldn’t decipher it, what hope had she?

26

The bed was shaking.

Ivy bolted upright. The wholeroomwas 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.”

27

The world outside Ivy’s window was slowly slipping into winter, the trees reluctantly shedding the last of their brittle leaves, the moors fading ever deeper into muted browns and washed-out golds, dismal grays. Frost touched the edges of the window, and in the garden, robins squabbled over flower heads gone to seed. But Ivy noticed none of this quiet drama. She was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to recall the plot ofLittle Women. Following a hairline crack in the plaster molding, names likeAmyandJofloated through her mind, but their faces and stories remained elusive. Her empty hands ached to hold a book in them again, and a new kind of loneliness spread through her, a kind that held no reprieve nor secret glimmer of hope.

Ivy’s melancholy thoughts were interrupted by a noise in the hall, followed by a key sliding into the door. Sitting up, she watched as Arthur came in cradling something swathed in maroon velvet, a servant behind him carrying a small wooden desk.

Wordlessly pushing aside the table which she took her dinners on, they arranged the desk in front of the window. Arthur produced fresh sheets of paper, pens and ink, and paperweights. “Don’t say I never did anything for you,” he muttered as he arranged them all. “My father would be apoplectic if he knew that I was giving you all of this. He thinks that I’m off to find the late Lord Hayworth’s notes.”

Ivy pressed her lips together, too curious as to this new turn of events to muster an argument.

When the desk had been prepared, Arthur took the manuscript from the servant with reverent hands, and placed it down. The servant was dismissed, and Ivy watched as Arthur carefully pulled back the velvet covering.

It was not an impressive book, not in the sense of elaborate binding or gilded embellishments. It was bound in simple leather, worn so soft and light that it might have been butter. But an overpowering sense of awe gripped Ivy all the same. The manuscript radiated potency, something drawing her to it yet repelling her at the same time. Her fingers twitched at her side, her eyes trained on the browned edges of the pages, just begging to be opened.

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