Page 69 of The Last Heir to Blackwood Library

Could it really be that simple? After every kind of imprisonment and tether that had bound her to the abbey, could she just simply leave it all behind? Where would she go? And did she even want to? Her body still ached, her hands fidgety at the memory of the pistol in them.

“Are you sure that it’s truly over?” she asked. “The other members of the club won’t press charges against me? They’ll leave me alone now?”

“They’d be bloody fools to try,” Ralph said. “The curse, or whatever it was, is broken, there’s nothing left for them in the library. Their leader is dead.” He paused, his hands clasped tight as if he did not know what to do with them. “Will you—will you stay?”

All the lovely dreams of Ralph that she had read of in the book were nothing more than that—dreams. A painful lump sat heavy in Ivy’s chest. She was a widow now. She had made her choice with Arthur and look where that had gotten her. There was no denying that Ralph was a good, upstanding man, but the Ralph of her dreams was not the man who sat before her.

“I’m staying,” she said, her decision crystallizing as the words came out of her mouth. “We’ll rebuild everything that was damaged, restore it to an even higher standard than it was before.” The only way to push the memories of the hellish night out of her mind would be to throw herself into a new project, one that would require all of her time and attention. This would be the fresh start she had been denied the first time around. Besides, there was something that still bound her to the abbey, though she could not name it.

Ralph’s shoulders relaxed a little. “Right,” he said, his voice a storm cloud with just a hint of sunshine peeking through. Pushing back the chair, he stood and shrugged into his old work coat.

“Where are you going?”

“To clean up that mess,” he said with a grimace.

Ivy started to sit up, but one look from Ralph told her that her presence would thankfully not be tolerated.

“Get some rest,” he instructed. He hesitated by the stairs, then doubled back and dropped a featherlight kiss on her temple. Before she could blink her shock away, he had gently tucked a quilt around her and then was descending, the steps creaking under his weight.

35

Four months later

Ivy emerged into a brilliant spring day with a sky as blue and sharp as cut crystal, tender green buds and pink petals spangling the bare tree branches. The smell of damp earth and sweet pollen had never felt so decadent before, so liberating. The previous four months had been spent supervising repairs and renovations at the abbey, and Ivy would fall into bed each night exhausted by the work required to bring her vision of a restored abbey to life. Ralph had taken care of the remains of the Sphinxes’ bloody experiment, though he refused to divulge to her how he had done it or what had become of Arthur’s remains. “It isn’t for you to worry about,” is all he would say, and Ivy was glad not to know.

When she and Ralph had brought the Hewitts back to the cell to show them the monk, all that remained was a pile of dust and jewels. “He’s gone back, then,” Mrs. Hewitt pronounced with a taut nod of her head. “To think, his evil bones were under the floors all these years, taking and sucking like a leech.” She toed a gold bracelet studded with rubies on the floor. “If we had known that he could be stopped, that it didn’t have to be like this...” Her words trailed to nothing.

“Does that mean that you’re free of your part of the pact now?” Ivy asked.

“Free of the library and our dark charge,” Hewitt said. “But not free of Blackwood, never free of Blackwood. The pact may have been broken, but our service to the family transcends all that.”

“It’s in our blood,” Mrs. Hewitt explained. “It’s as much our home as it is yours.”

Now as Ivy stood on the abbey’s front steps, the ancient stones beneath her feet and the battlements silhouetted against the sky above her, she finally understood what they meant. It was not just memories and bloodlines that tied them to this place, but a deep sense of stewardship. She was as much a thread in the tapestry of the history of Blackwood as all those who came before her.

Ralph had brought the car around and was holding open the door for her, dressed in his deep green livery, brass buttons shining in the sun. Her heart did a fluttery dance in her chest as she stopped just short of him. She could still feel the light brush of his lips on her forehead, though neither of them had spoken of it. In fact, she had hardly seen anything of Ralph the past months, let alone spoken to him. He was a constant presence in the abbey, and she would often hear him overseeing the construction workers, but whenever she went to seek him out, he would suddenly be otherwise engaged or mysteriously just on his way out the door. But that morning he had sought her out in the library, and asked if he could drive her somewhere after tea. All he had said was that it was a surprise, a place that he thought she should see.

Ivy studied the back of Ralph’s neck as he drove, where the starched white collar met his lightly tanned skin. It felt strange to share such a small, intimate space with him and yet not have the slightest clue what he was thinking, what was causing his shoulders to hunch just a little.

Eventually they crested a peak, and a valley scattered with ruins came into view, glittering in the sunlight trapped between the rolling hills. Ralph parked the car near the bottom, and helped her out.

The sun warmed her cheeks as she lifted her face to follow the stones into the sky. Here were the romantic ruins that she had envisioned when she’d first come to Yorkshire, rugged nature cradling something beautifully fragile yet defiant against the passage of centuries.

“It’s beautiful. What is this place?”

“Rievaulx Abbey,” he told her. “Didn’t fare so well as Blackwood after the Dissolution. Been in ruins for centuries.”

While it might have been a skeleton of its former self, it was a graceful decay. Arches made of honey-colored stone soared up into the clear blue sky, and birds sang their cheery sermons from the airy pulpits. A herd of disinterested sheep watched Ivy and Ralph as they scrambled over the rocks and through half-standing doorways. Ralph took Ivy’s hand firmly in his, helping her navigate the uneven terrain.

By the time they had made it to what must have once been the transept, Ivy’s color was high and her lungs were burning from the effort of climbing and scrambling. It felt wonderful. Later in the spring, the abbey must have been favored by local artists, easels set up to capture the romantic sprawl of ruins. But on this mild, early March afternoon, it was deserted save for the two of them, their footsteps and voices echoing off the shallow valley walls.

Ralph was gazing up at a pair of birds on one of the soaring walls, hands jammed in his coat pockets, a small furrow in his brow.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“They aren’t worth that much.”

“Ralph,” she insisted.

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