Before Florence, the Order was led by Charles Mathers, the grandfather Stephen never met. Charles was determined to find a medium for his generation, as his older brother George had when he’d found Olanna. But he was frustrated at every turn, though his search was frenetic. He spread the Order throughout the globe with the promise the Darkness had made: members would be given the chance to perpetuate their consciousness on this plane; that is, to experience a form of immortality on earth. He found, in fact, many mediums in various parts of the world, but he couldn’t keep any of them alive very long or achieve significant advances. It’s all in the Book. A young woman who died during the Ceremonial. A teenager who killed himself after barely a month as the Order’s medium. A young man in the United States who tried to strangle several Initiates before dying from a stroke. Charles realized how difficult it was to keep these sinister children alive and lucid, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Florence was the first one to understand.

The news of Encarnación, the teenager found in Figueres, Cataluña, reached him after the bombings in the winter of 1939. Charles wasn’t afraid of traveling to a country at war, nor of entering a region that was so troubled during that time. He went through France. He found the girl still traumatized, mad from grief and terror: she had lost her whole family in the Francoist attack. He brought the girl to France with the help of the Margaralls, an aristocratic family that belonged to the Order. The chosen city was Perpignan.

The child was raped many times, and I call it rape even though the Order speaks of sexual magic. No kind of sexual magic is required in the Ceremonial or with the medium, and Charles knew it. He let himself get carried away by ambition, he ceded to the perversions of members of the Order who were challenging his power, and he gave in to the demented vortex of war. After months of imprisonment, Encarnación escaped through one of the ground-floor windows, and then she returned to the house, where most members of the Order were sleeping, with a shotgun stolen from a nearby farm. She killed them all. Charles was there with his sons, Florence’s brothers—her father had instructed Florence to stay in London, which saved her life. The Margaralls were there, and all the most important families in the Order, at least the ones who had dared to cross Europe. In addition to killing them, Encarnación used a knife to destroy the genitals of all the Order’s men. She was fourteen years old and pregnant. Stephen showed me a photo of her: a thin child with a headband holding her dark hair back from her face.