Page 65 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

She sagged against him, wanting more than anything for him to be right. If it was truly over, then the tugging in her heart would slacken, and she would be free.

“No,” she said, as much to force herself to accept the inevitable as to convince him. “It’s not. We have to stop Arthur from whatever it is he plans to do.”

Ralph scrubbed at his jaw, looked as if he wanted to argue, but he finally nodded. He put his ear to the door, listening. “I go first,” he said sternly. “If it’s clear, follow me.”

Ivy had assumed it was morning, but as they passed through the hidden door into the library, the sky beyond the window was an ashy gray, the sun just slipping below the horizon. Had they been in the cell for hours, or had an entire day passed? Feet still sore and blistered, she let Ralph help her pick her way through the burnt rubble.

“Wait.” Among the overturned shelves and burnt beams, a book lay face up, a splash of white in the darkness. “I’ve seen this book before, in my dream,” she told Ralph as she rummaged the book out of the debris and brushed ash from its cover. “It—it knows everything about me, all my dreams and memories.”

The book sat heavy in her hand. Here was the sum of her life, the dreams, both good and bad, that filled her mind. The salty summer days spent in Brighton, the blanket forts and evenings reading by lamplight. Wandering the stacks of the library as her father tunelessly hummed while he worked. All those precious memories and so many more, the patches needed to fill a moth-eaten quilt, all lay within the book.

But before she could read even one page, the book quavered in her palms. Pages flipped open on their own accord, the words fading faster than she could read them, as if erased by some invisible hand. Throwing it down, Ivy backed up into Ralph, and they stood together, watching as her memories disappeared. The monk had been the sinew that held together the body of the library, the memories and dreams the pumping blood in a symbiotic relationship. But now the monk was gone, and there was nothing to hold it all together.

Soon a cyclone of pages was whipping through the air. Somewhere deeper in the library all the books of every Hayworth and librarian must likewise have been evaporating. Where would all those stories, those memories, go once they were no longer condemned to the pages of the monk’s collection? Ivy braced herself, waiting for her memories to come flooding back, but there was no great flash of light, no moment of complete enlightenment. Ivy felt the same as she had a moment ago, moored to reality by the strange encounters in the cell, but unable to grasp any threads of her past, except for whatever the monk had thought fit to leave her with. The rest had disappeared into the ether with the monk, gone forever.

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.”

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