Papa’s books were gone.
Nearly gone.
There were still his private books, the ones he kept locked away.
Isabella pulled on the chain that hung around her neck and drew forth the key her father had clutched against his chest even as he took his final breath. The metal was warm in her hand, warmed by her skin, but the key felt heavy. She let it drop against her bodice and went to her father’s chamber, to the brass-clad wooden trunk in the corner. The wraith followed, drifting in her wake.
She knelt and traced her fingertips along the engravings. Scarabs with wings splayed open. Cobras with their hoods flared. The eye of Horus.
She lifted the key, her breath coming fast and shallow.
The whispers were there, always there. They skittered across her skin like icy fingertips, tangled in her hair, and sighed in her ears.
The wraith hovered, translucent and gray, her hollow eyes fixed on Papa’s trunk.
Isabella turned the key, then hesitated. Papa had locked these secrets away for a reason. He had always been careful and calm. Yet the man he had been in his final weeks had spent more and more time with the contents of this trunk, and that man had been different than the Papa she had always known. Furtive. Secretive. Haunted by sorrow and regret, burdened by the weight of secrets he refused to divulge. The man he had been in his final days had carried a kind of madness. The contents of this trunk had changed him.
She wondered what might awaken in her should she delve into those tomes—not knowledge, but inclination. What if these books were not merely Papa’s interest, but his affliction? And what if she had inherited the craving? After all, was she not already just a little bit mad?
Before she could talk herself out of it, she pushed open the lid.
The air stilled, the silence so profound it felt like it had a weight of its own.
She reached for a book, its cover charred, the edges of its pages curled and blackened. The scent of old smoke and something ancient and bitter rose to meet her. Or did she only imagine it? Her fingers hovered, a feeling of foreboding seeping through her.
She feared these were not merely books, but dormant things, coiled, waiting, watching, eager to awaken beneath a reader’s gaze.
The memory of her father’s voice filled her thoughts. I will not tell you that these books are not for you, Isa. It is no person’s right to tell another what they may or may not read. But I will offer a warning. If you open this chest, if you open these books, be certain that you wish to see what secrets lie within. Once known, they cannot be unknown. His expression had been mournful, filled with regret.
Was this the mistake he had alluded to that morning at breakfast? Had he believed owning these books was a mistake? Or had he believed that keeping them locked away was the mistake? Or had he been referring to something else entirely? Questions nested inside questions.
The ever-present whispers became a roar. A deep dread threaded through her, and with it the certainty that the dead craved what was in this trunk, yearned for the knowledge in these pages to be set free.
She jerked back. The pressure of the air eased, the weight on her chest lifting enough to let her breathe. Her mouth tasted of ash and metal.
“I am not in the mood for secrets today, Papa. I have more practical matters to address,” she whispered. Then she gave a sad laugh. “Or perhaps I am just a coward.”
That was a small truth. She was afraid, not of these books, but of what they might awaken and of the part of herself that wanted to know regardless of cost.
After locking the trunk once more, she left the room. But even as she returned to her father’s study, she could not shake the feeling that she had not permanently locked away the danger, merely delayed it.
In the days that followed, letters arrived, some in response to hers, others to the notice she had posted. Those from her father’s colleagues offered condolences and regrets rather than employment, and while she appreciated the former, she was in dire need of the latter.
Each missive she read felt like peeling away another layer of possibility, only to find it hollow within.
Often did her gaze fall on the train ticket to Maidenhead sitting on the corner of the desk. To use it would not merely see her removed from London, it would deliver her into Rhys Caradoc’s keeping, into the very hands of the man Papa had despised. And feared. She could not persuade herself that entering his employ was a choice she ought to make, yet neither could she convince herself to toss the ticket into the fire and foreclose the possibility altogether.
One letter contained a marriage proposal, suggesting she might care for a particular gentleman in his declining years in exchange for a roof over her head and food on her plate. She knew of the gentleman, a foul-tempered, foul-mouthed creature, not a friend of her father’s but an acquaintance of an acquaintance. She replied at once, declining, polite and firm, offering no opportunity for rebuttal.
Another invited her to call and present her credentials for the position of governess, but when she did, the woman interviewing her had stated in rather blunt terms, “A plain woman would better suit.”
Isabella was not a fool. She knew exactly why a plain woman might be preferred where there were the master of the house and his two strapping sons to consider. It would matter little if she reassured her interviewer that she had no interest in pursuing any of them. A woman’s interest in such matters was not usually a consideration for a certain type of man.
The next day, she tried again, tipping her umbrella as she hurried along Holborn, skirts caught in the draught made by an omnibus shouldering past. The city was a tangle of movement and sound, iron rims biting stone, a newsboy’s thin cry, the wet slap of hooves, each noise making a notch in her nerves. She had an interview off Red Lion Street in fifteen minutes and ink on the thumb of her glove that would not come off however she worried at it.
If this interview went like all those that had preceded it, she would be thanked for calling and shown a polite door.
A disturbance in the air touched her bare wrist where her glove had worn thin. Cold, quick, seeking. She knew the feel, like a draft from a cellar mouth, and set her face forward as if the street were all she could see.
