Page 77 of Darkest at Dusk
She would be seen.
Her eyes lifted to Rhys’s. She was seen.
A book, split down the spine, its halves sundered. A secret. My secret. Catrin’s secret was not hers alone. It never had been.
“I will show you,” Isabella said, pulse hammering.
They dressed without ceremony. When he helped her with her clothing, he did it with deft fingers, and the brief warmth of his knuckles at her hip felt like a promise kept.
“Ready?” he asked.
She touched Papa’s key at her breast. “Yes.”
Chapter Nineteen
The corridor was quiet as they passed.
When they reached Isabella’s chamber, she paused and drew a deep breath before opening the door. The room was still and silent, a strange thing, that. The quiet should have felt like a reprieve. Instead, it felt like a threat, the calm before the storm. Papa’s trunk sat in the corner, the iron-banded oak scuffed at the corners. She knelt and set her palm on the lid as she had done a dozen times alone, feeling the echo of her father’s hand beneath her own. Rhys remained a step back, present, but careful not to crowd.
“Once I open it,” she said, surprised by how calm her voice sounded, “we won’t be able to pretend we are two people who merely share a house.”
“We stopped pretending last night,” he said gently. “We are partners.”
The word struck her harder than any vow of devotion. Partners. Not employee and master. Not lover and lord. Not a woman tolerated in a man’s design. Partners. From his lips it was not courtesy but conviction, the scandalous belief that she stood beside him, not behind. Heat gathered beneath her ribs, so fierce her breath was stolen and returned all at once.
She pulled the key from around her neck and fitted it into the lock. The bit turned with a soft, stubborn click and the lid gave. Leather and paper breathed up: starch, dust, the faint ghost of tobacco from nights when Papa had bent long over a page. She lifted out oilcloth-wrapped books and folios. Beneath, wrapped with care, lay the book.
Even swaddled, it seemed to hum.
She set it on the rug and sat before it, peeling the cloth aside. The binding had been cleft clean down its spine, so that one board and half the gatherings remained. Brass flared dully in the hearthlight, the inlay fitting like mosaic along a broken edge, a curve that promised and a second curve missing. The design was like a broken coin, its halves once whole.
The leather was the sober brown of a gentleman’s ledger, but the tooling at the border told a different story. Thorns and lilies twined, peril and beauty braided so close that to reach for one was to bleed on the other. The vellum leaves clung to their cords, notes scrawled in a small, cramped hand in the margins. Circles within circles. Words struck out and written again.
Rhys eased to the floor opposite her, a wince twisting his features as he forced his leg into submission. For a long breath he did not touch the book.
“You’ve been carrying a church under your arm,” he said at last, voice rough.
Isabella gave a wan smile. “It has felt like a tomb.”
A church. A place of ritual, of voices raised, of thresholds crossed. A tomb. A place of sealed silence and the weight of the dead. She supposed they were speaking of the same thing, only from different sides of the stone they both bore.
He lifted his eyes to hers. “You do not carry it alone, my Isabella. I have the other half.” His hand hovered over the broken spine. “I found it after the fire, in Catrin’s chamber, swaddled in muslin, hidden beneath her bed. Her diary makes me wonder…perhaps it chose her.”
“And she welcomed that choice,” Isabella murmured. “She opened her arms to the darkness like a lover.”
She pressed her palm flat to the book, steadying her own pulse as much as its hum. Had it felt so alive when she had touched it before, or was it the combined presence of Rhys and herself that made it do so now?
“Tell me the truth, Rhys. Did you come to my father’s house that day for me? For this half of the book? Or for something else altogether?” she asked, quiet but fierce.
His jaw tightened but he did not look away. “For all of it,” he said. “For the book because I had hunted the twin to my own for years. For you. And for something else beside. For help.”
She searched his face, the swell of his lips, the dark stubble along his jaw, the weight in his gray eyes. Her throat closed on Papa’s old warnings. Never say it. Never show it. She swallowed them down. “What did you say to Papa that morning to drive him to such anger?”
“I told him my truth. All of it. The voices. The visions. St. Jude’s. And for a moment, he wavered. He told me more than he meant to. About your own voices and visions, about the things he feared for you. That he had spent years gathering every volume he could, every tract and scrap, searching for a way to banish the wraiths. He wanted to free you.”
The words gouged her composure. All her life she had thoughts Papa’s rules meant doubt, that his silence was denial. In truth, it had been a shield. Her eyes stung.
“He wanted to save me,” she whispered.
