“Are you saying that the fiend is aware of us and seeks us out?” Anne glanced around as if she were a little afraid the suspect might still be hiding amongst the books.

“Whoever they are, I can’t help but feel that they must either have observed us closely or know us very well,” Emily said. “Somehow guessing our plans almost as soon as we make them. For only then could they know we’d come to Ponden library today.”

“Throw the book away,” Anne said unhappily. “Throw it on the fire, for it is evil.”

“No book is evil, Anne,” Emily told her sister, seeing Anne’s unease. “Not even this one or the parts of it that have been torn out. The people who followed these ways were—are—no more dangerous to you and me than the ancient Celts or Romans. They had their beliefs, and we have ours, do we not? We have nothing to fear from words, Anne, only something to learn of our own human history.”

“I would agree with you, Emily, if it weren’t for the bones,” Anne said unhappily, rubbing briskly at the tops of her arms as if she were suddenly very cold. “Even if these rites and spells are all a forgotten fiction, the bones of the child are not. And if the strange design is connected to the remains, and it seems impossible to imagine otherwise, then it is a book such as the one you hold in your hands at this moment, perhaps even that very copy, that incited murder.”

Emily looked down at the book, feeling the reassuring weight of it in her hands. She could never think of any book as anything other than a friend.

“It is only ink and paper,” she said. “It is Man who kills, Anne, as Man always has for his own cruel and distorted reasons. It is only that sometimes Man makes words his unwitting accomplices, and—oh—” Emily stopped talking as she made out the archaic description written along the margin of one of the torn fragments. “Oh dear.”

“Emily?” Anne turned towards her, wringing her hands tightly. “What is it? What have you discovered?”

“The missing pages,” Emily said, closing the book and returning it to the shelf. “It seems it is a charm to return the dead to life.”

23

Charlotte

“Really, Robert, that is so interesting,” Charlotte said, smiling intently at young Robert, who was earnestly regaling her with how the various Heaton business interests were performing. “How marvellous. I’m so pleased to hear it.”

“Yes, we Heatons are quite a solid proposal, financially speaking,” Robert said. “And speaking of proposals—”

“And who has visited you recently?” Emily asked.

Charlotte blinked at her sister. She had never known another individual who could turn the subject of a conversation with such a brazen disregard for manners as her sister.