Page 59 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

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.

31

Someone—or something—was approaching.

The scraping sound of footsteps slogging through debris shattered Ivy’s rest, and she sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Why was she in the library of all places? Rolling her stiff neck, she tried to gather her bearings until the footsteps were almost upon her.

Instinct told her to hide, and no sooner had she crept behind a shelf, than voices accompanied the steps, becoming clearer as they approached. “...and the library, it will still know to feed from her, and her only?” the first voice asked.

“Yes, I am sure of it,” answered the second voice. It was a man, coolly confident and very familiar. “I’ve read through her notes extensively. Once I enter my name in the ledger I will be in control, but it will still feed off of her. It will always revert to Hayworth blood, given the chance.”

Ivy peered around the shelf. The man with his back to her smelled of cheap tobacco, his big arms strapped with unforgiving muscles. Beside him, she could just make out the profile of another man. He looked familiar with his dark hair and handsome features. He might have been a film star if not for the hard set to his mouth, the frenzied glint in his eyes.

“Christ, this will be a fortune to clean,” he muttered as he kicked at a fallen beam.

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