Olanna survived two months. The night of the final ritual was almost no different, except that the Darkness surrounding Olanna lunged—there was no other way to describe it, George said in his diary—and when it touched one of the Initiates, a young woman with her face covered, it opened a deep cut in her left arm. She was rapt in ecstasy and didn’t feel the pain, but later she almost lost her arm, which required several operations. After the Darkness leaped, Olanna was motionless as always, silvery and red, but now frighteningly thin, her teeth protruding, her skull perfect under her skin, her eyes sunken. She no longer stuck out her tongue. When George picked her up, he was surprised: she was cold. No fever. He didn’t think it was a good sign. In her final delirium, Olanna wept. Lily dried her tears: her father-in-law had ordered her to collect them in small containers that looked like test tubes, but she had only done it once before telling her husband that she would not obey that cruel man. Couldn’t he see the ribs that seemed to want to rip through Olanna’s skin, or how her beautiful color was turning gray, how the scars on her face looked white? Olanna, you don’t have to do this, Lily had told her, naked except for her flapper’s headband that crossed her forehead and kept her short hair in place. In less than an hour, the Princess of Nri and the medium of the Darkness stopped breathing. Lily cried with her hands submerged in a bowl of ice.

Lily and George took care of Olanna’s burial in Highgate, the most beautiful cemetery in London, though it was in decline in those days. Lily had a stone sphinx carved and ordered it placed beneath an oak tree. The grave had neither name nor dates: the burial of an African teenager in a state of malnutrition caught the authorities’ attention, but the Mathers’ money could silence any scandal. Christopher would have preferred to keep her body or use her ashes for rituals, but George put his foot down. Don’t take all her dignity, he pleaded. She gave us so much. His father permitted the grave.

Years later, however, it would be desecrated. Few people know this, but Olanna’s skull, embellished with jewels, is used by the women of the Order in secret meetings, in dances and invocations. I attended at least two, in London. I say at least two because Florence let me use psychedelic drugs in certain rituals, and sometimes, in my dreams, I remember the skull with its forehead shining red—it’s set with rubies—and I remember a woman lifting her skirt and displaying, between her legs, what looked like a long tail.

It was Lily who decided to go with her husband to Africa: George had to return and control the family’s business, this time at trading posts on the Niger River. On the long, happy voyage there, Lily got pregnant. But they didn’t turn back home: the child would be born in hot lands and, with any luck, he would be a great master, powerful and compassionate. A child who would come to change the Order and its practice of exploiting mediums.