I spent the remainder of the week mostly in the serenity of the third floor for my own recuperation. Although my chest felt better with each passing day, I would occasionally catch myself painfully on a deep breath or sudden turn. I wondered if the little pink scar would eventually vanish, or if my skin had been branded forever. I’m not entirely sure I would have wanted it gone—it was a private badge of my first real adventure.

I lay on the soft grass often, watching the reflections of the pond dance across the ceiling and enjoying the good company of Jenny and even Douglas. Jackaby, however, had made himself scarce as we approached the day of the memorial. Once, while I had nodded off on a carpet of wildflowers near the water’s edge, I was awoken by Jenny’s soft voice.

“She’s doing very well,” she was saying. “She’ll have the scar to remember it by, but it’s healing cleanly. Poor girl. She’s still so young.”

I kept my eyes closed and breathed evenly as Jackaby responded. “She’s older than her years,” he said.

“I think that might be sadder, somehow,” Jenny breathed.

“Anyway, it’s not her chest I’m concerned about—it’s her head.”

“Still deciding whether she’s fit for the job?” asked the ghost.

“Oh, she’ll do,” answered Jackaby. “The question is, is this job fit for her?”

In the evening, I found myself back in the waiting room. The piles of paperwork and books, which had once occupied the desk, were still lying in a heap on the floor, having been shoved aside while the room served as an impromptu medical ward. Otherwise, the chamber looked much as it had on my first visit. I glanced around, remembering not to linger on the terrarium.

Poking out of a bin in the far corner, alongside two umbrellas and a croquet mallet, stood a polished iron cane, fitted with what I knew now to be a false grip. Swift’s deadly pike was housed innocuously among the bric-a-brac, but it was a subtle memorial to his victims—and to my own blundering, which had nearly made me one of them.

Jackaby’s eclectic home began to make a little more sense to me, then. The man had no portraits or photographs, but he had slowly surrounded himself with mementos of a fantastic past. Each little item, by the sheer nature of its being, told a story. Looking around was a little like being back on the dig, or like deciphering an ancient text, and I wondered what stories they would tell me if I only knew how to read them. How many carried fond memories? How many, like the redcap’s polished weapon, were silent reminders of mistakes made or even lives lost?

Chapter Thirty