“I would spare you from doing it,” Mary said.
“Spare me nothing,” said Lucy. “This is my task, and I shall endure it, I hope with your help. But for now, let us take the book and go while we still can.”
“Hold,” said Mr. Morrison. “If her intentions are no more than she says, then why did she send her monster to attack us?”
“What monster?” asked Mary, her eyes suddenly narrowing.
“Byron’s tortoise,” Lucy said. “It was transformed into a raging beast and set upon us.”
Mary’s expression darkened. “Lucy, for the love of God, we must leave at once.”
“What is it?” Mr. Morrison asked.
“If what you say is true, then Lady Harriett is here, upon these grounds.”
In a swift motion, Mary removed one of her shotguns and held it in her hands. It looked absurdly incongruous—she, the pale, ethereal beauty, taking hold of the weapon.
Mr. Morrison watched her for a moment then took one of his own weapons. “They’re here?”
She nodded. “I can feel them. I’ve loaded my gun against their kind, but my little trick won’t work on Lady Harriett, you know. She is too powerful.”
“I know,” he said. “After I killed her late husband, she found a way to indemnify herself against it, but not the others.”
“Have you discovered what will work on her?” asked Mary.
“Not yet,” he said.
Mary turned to Byron. “Why would she choose to come here? Have you made any arrangements with Lady Harriett? Have you leased her any land? Is anything here hers?”
Lucy understood. At Lady Harriett’s estate, Lucy’s charms had been ineffective because there had been wards against them, wards that only the rightful owner of a property could employ. Newstead ought to be neutral, but if Lady Harriett had legally acquired the rights to part of it, that part might be protected.
“Oh, put the shotgun away, Mary,” said Byron. “It is unbecoming. Yes, I leased her some land. She wished to use part of my property to establish a hosiery mill, of all things.”
Mr. Olson’s new mill. It came full circle. “So much for your speech in defense of the Luddites in the House of Lords,” Lucy said.
“Oh, I never really believed most of that. It sounded quite right, of course, but there is politics and there is money, and I know which I value more, so when Lady Harriett made her offer, my lukewarm sympathy for the Luddites cooled entire. In any case, I owed her a debt, and Lady Harriett is not someone to refuse.”
“There must be something in the contract that grants her power here,” Mr. Morrison said to Lucy. “She will first try to make you give her the pages. She will want to take them from you by force, but her first choice will be to own them. Lucy, you cannot let her have them. Better to destroy the book than to let her have it.”
Lucy clutched the pages to her chest. “If we destroy the book, we will have no weapon against her. If I cannot defeat her, I cannot safely return my niece to her mother. We must get away until I’ve had a chance to learn what the book will teach me.”
Mary smiled at Lucy. “I admire your courage, Lucy, and applaud your sentiments. I shall lead the way. In the meantime, I suggest we do something about Byron. He is a menace and unpredictable.”
The latter part of her assessment certainly proved correct, for when they looked around, Byron was nowhere to be found. After a brief discussion it was agreed that he could not easily be discovered if he wished to hide in his own ruined abbey, and that he possessed little that could harm them and nothing they needed. While he might have run off to alert Lady Harriett to their presence, taking the time to search for him would be a self-defeating effort. In short, their first priority was flight. Byron was a problem that would wait for a more opportune moment.
Lucy held out her hand to Mary. “We might be separated. I must have what is mine.”
With no more hesitation than a few rapid blinks, Mary handed the final pages to Lucy. They felt as heavy as iron in her hands, as alive as a beating heart, as vital as a bolt of lightning. She did not even look at them except long enough to see the telltale signs of Mr. Blake’s designs. They felt so powerful, they frightened her, and they seemed to be gathering power, quickening in her grasp, urging her to action. The pages wanted to be looked at, to be understood and deciphered.
She closed her mind to them. New ideas would only confuse and distract. There would be time enough for that when she was alone. Instead she took the pages and placed them with the others. She rolled them up into a tube and placed them into the secret folds of her frock, where she kept her herbs and charms and tokens. The secret pockets were getting heavy with old and discarded tokens of her adventure that she dared not throw away, for she could not know what she would need to survive.
Mary led them out of the hall toward the main entrance. The body of the horrible tortoise lay there, already covered with an impossibly thick halo of flies. More flies crawled upon it, countless flies, an impossible number, so that the body appeared a living, writhing, buzzing mass. It turned Lucy’s stomach, and she hesitated to approach, and in that moment of hesitation she saw movement in the darkness. Four figures, cloaked in shadow, and yet vaguely familiar. In the flickering light of Mrs. Emmett’s lantern, Lucy recognized the revenants she had seen in Lady Harriett’s house, led by the gray-haired Mr. Whitestone.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Whitestone, stepping forward. “Lady Harriett says we are to take your book, young lady. Please hand it to me.”
At that instant, Mr. Morrison and Mary raised their shotguns.
Mr. Whitestone managed a nervous smile. The other three revenants looked at them and then at Mr. Whitestone, then at the ground. They seemed dazed and disoriented, and Lucy understood they were so impossibly old that their sense of self had in some manner altered. They had been in the world so long, they were no longer of this world.
“You cannot harm us,” said Mr. Whitestone. “There is no point in resisting.”
“If we cannot harm you,” said Mr. Morrison, “why did Lady Harriett not come herself?”
“We can harm you, and we will,” said Mary.
“No,” answered Mr. Whitestone. “You would not use our own secrets against your own kind. You have never wished to be one of us, but you cannot be so lost as that, Miss Crawford.”
He stepped forward, reaching out as if to take Mary’s weapon away from her. She fired. The heavy scent of rotten eggs filled the air, and Mr. Whitestone staggered backwards, a massive wound open in his chest. Shot had scattered among the other revenants, but their wounds were smaller, less brutal. They bled all the same.
“This feels odd,” said Mr. Whitestone, looking down at his wound. “It does not close.”
They had filled their shotguns with sulfur, mercury, and gold, allowing the shot to penetrate and preventing the wounds from closing. The same understanding crossed Mr. Whitestone’s pale face. He staggered forward and fell to his knees. He looked up at Lucy, as though she were the one who had fired upon him. “All along,” he said, “it was you. And here is the other secret.” But he said no more. He pitched forward, face-first onto the cold stone.
The three remaining revenants looked at one another, then looked down at the body, then looked at Mr. Morrison and Mary, who was in the process of discarding her spent weapon for the fresh one. Perhaps the creatures were so outraged that one of their own had been, impossibly, killed, but Lucy did not think so. Even at that moment she could not help but believe they wanted to die, to end their existence, these creatures who had walked the earth for so many centuries that they could no longer remember who or what they were. They leapt forward and Mary and Mr. Morrison discharged their weapons nearly simultaneously. Mr. Morrison then cast his spent gun aside and took the fresh one, and fired it into the mass moving toward him.