“Of course, miss,” Eamon said. “There is one more thing. The second date, etched into the silver on the reverse? That has nothing to do with the miracles. It must have been added later, scratched on by hand, but I can’t tell you of its meaning. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, taking Eamon’s hands in hers for a moment. “I do not yet know what it means either, but you have taken me a little closer to finding out, and if my family or I can ever help you in return, then be assured we will be your friends and allies.”

22

Emily

Knowing the library’s contents and the arrangement of its books a good deal better than Anne, Emily went straight to her most likely source of enlightenment: a two-hundred-year-old volume entitled, innocuously enough, The Book of Magical Charms, written, as far as she could divine, by two seventeenth-century witches. She had come across it before and had taken great pleasure in opening the thick vellum pages, stiff with age, and tracing her fingertip over the strange spidery print that was unlike anything else she had ever seen. But now, upon closer inspection, it seemed to contain nothing much more interesting than spells on how to cheat at dice and to curse your neighbour’s cow and make a rather nice soup.

That had been her best hope. Now all she was left with was a rather dull volume on necromancy and something that claimed to ensure success in alchemy, which she was rather tempted to take home, as it would be so nice to turn lead into gold and never have to think about leaving Papa again.

“Oh!” Anne exclaimed, holding a large dusty book open in her arms. “Pass me your drawing, Emily, at once!”

“What have you found?” Emily asked her, incredulous. “You have not found the answer to a possible pagan sacrifice in A Short Historie of Yorkshyre and Its Peoples. I began to read that and then put it away when I realised that it was very much less interesting than looking out of the window. Family trees and such, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but if you had looked a little closer, you’d see there is a book hidden within,” Anne said, her eyes wide at her discovery. “By which I mean the pages of a second book have been bound into this one, presumably to keep it secret from prying eyes. After all, two hundred years ago a person could have been hung for having such material.” Anne laid the book open on the floor. “Now, it seems as if most of the secret book has been torn out—only fragments remain. But one such fragment reminds me strongly of the mysterious design.”

“Let me inspect the evidence.” Emily knelt beside her sister, frowning deeply.