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She lowered the desk’s fall front. As she’d feared, the water had seeped inside. The poems Grandmama had written on scraps of paper and stuffed in the pigeonholes—also wet. Mostly just the edges, but on a few, the inked lines had lifted up and run together.

“No,” she cried, not for the first time that week. “No, no, no.”

She extracted poem after poem, carrying the damp scraps to her bedchamber, where she could spread them out.

No poem had been rendered truly illegible, but even so, she felt shivery and sick, and furious with herself.

Why hadn’t she ever made a fair copy of Grandmama’s magnificent sonnets?

She’d treated Grandmama’s desk like a cabinet of wonders, each scrap a one-of-a-kind object.

As soon as the poems dried, she’d copy them all.

She moped back to the blue room and was blotting the little puddles inside the desk’s emptied pigeonholes when she noticed something else.

The central walnut panel dividing the pigeonholes had popped slightly forward along its left edge. The panel was, in fact, a little door, if not deliberately secreted in the desk, so discreetly engineered, she’d never registered its existence.

She let the rag drop.

An instant later, she was prying the little door open with her fingernails.

Folded papers filled the space behind.

She smoothed them as best she could and read the first, the second, the third. She read faster and faster, forgetting even to blink.

Still reading, she burst into the library.

“Hwat!” Papa cried out when she touched his shoulder. It was his most guttural, Beowulfian cry.

She fell back a step, but only a step.

“Wretched heathen men!” She waved the papers, bouncing on her toes. “Papa, another reference to the Northmen in Twynham! Tenth century!”

“You are waving sheets of foolscap.” Papa glared at her over his reading spectacles, his expression severe. “Foolscap is not tenth century. Foolscap is paper . Plant fiber. In the tenth century, scribes wrote on parchment, or vellum. Animal skin. Youngling, I despair of you.”

“Paper, I know! I mean, Papa. Papa, I know the difference between paper and parchment. There’s no need for bears.

I mean, despair.” She was tripping over her words in her eagerness to explain.

“This is Grandmama’s writing. She is writing about a tenth-century manuscript.

It must be here, in the library. The Chronicle of Sexburga of Twynham.

She was a nun at the abbey. Look, there’s a section called ‘Concerning the Wretched Heathen Men.’?”

She thrust the relevant page under Papa’s nose. He snatched it from her but spared it only a glance.

“This is English.” He handed back the page.

“Sexburga wrote in Latin, of course. Grandmama was translating. Papa, have you ever seen Sexburga’s chronicle, the original? We have to find it!”

She didn’t add: And then dig again on the bluff. Surely once Papa beheld the finely lettered leaves of parchment spelling out the story of the Northmen in Twynham, he’d agree that digging on the bluff was now compulsory.

“ The Chronicle of Sexburga of Twynham. ” He gave an incredulous snort. “You may refer to the shelf list. That chronicle is not here. Because it doesn’t exist.”

“It must. Grandmama—”

“Was writing a novel,” interrupted Papa. “Your grandmother had only the rudiments of other tongues. She couldn’t translate Latin, or Saxon, or anything else.”

“Oh, but she did. Both.” Elfreda shuffled the papers again. “See here, she copied out the abbey’s charter. The boundary clause would have been in Latin, but with the landmarks in Saxon.” She read the landmarks aloud. “Old manure heap. Wild iris patch. Swing gate. Thorn tree. Wolf pit.”

“Novelists often pretend to write true accounts.” Papa shrugged. “What novel doesn’t include invented documents and letters?”

He had a point.

But novelists invented those documents and letters to serve an artistic design, to heighten the drama and further the action.

“There are pages on the regulations introduced by the new abbess,” said Elfreda, with more shuffling. “On customs and dues. The price of flax. Papa, there’s no plot . There are hardly any incidents whatsoever. It’s not novelistic in the least.”

Papa sighed and shook his head. “Good mother. She was unable to distinguish between the important and the trivial. She read all my father’s papers, but unfortunately, his erudition clogged her mind with superfluities.”

Elfreda glanced at the portrait that hung between two of the tall mahogany bookcases, Grandpapa in his druidical robes. He had died long before her birth, but based on everything she’d ever read, of his and of Grandmama’s, she was the intellect.

Papa saw it otherwise. So did the Albion Society. The whole world.

Papa was still speaking. “She loved ruins, but because she thought them beautiful—not because she perceived their relationship to great events, to war, to government. She wrote poems about Twynham Abbey. I’m not surprised she was also writing a novel.

” He sighed again. “ How the dark age stones do crumble, ” he quoted, and Elfreda’s mouth fell open.

Papa, too, had lines of Grandmama’s poetry by heart? He’d never let on.

Before she could formulate a reply, he rose and began to pace.

“She resented my father for breaking the entail,” he said, pacing up to Grandpapa’s portrait before turning back and pacing up to Elfreda. “But it was lose a few hundred acres, and the abbey, or lose everything. Mother didn’t understand the necessity.”

“She understood the necessity! She resented what made the necessity necessary.” Elfreda gulped as Papa’s brows lowered. But if he’d read through Grandmama’s diaries, as well as her poems, he’d know that she’d kept accounts and disapproved of her husband’s spending.

Grandpapa had drained the family coffers carting full-grown oaks from Wiltshire to plant in his own sacred grove.

Printing one thousand gilt-edged, lavishly illustrated copies of his final book, Druid Temples and Their Origins .

Nobody had ever bought one. They’d been stacked for decades in the gatehouse.

“ You presume to understand?” Papa gripped the collar of his greatcoat with both hands. “ You? ”

Elfreda held her tongue.

After a long moment, Papa’s glare drifted away from her, toward the windows, which rattled with wind and rain.

“I resent that glorified fishmonger,” he growled.

“John Redmayne. He’s to blame. He swore he’d preserve the abbey.

Instead, he built his crass, common-rate manor right on top of it.

And now his grandson, the scheming Major , comes sniffing around my property.

Mark me. He’s a fox, and a fox always leads with his nose.

He wants this hall. He wants to smother it with stucco, and carpets, and wallpapers.

Destroy its character and change its name. ”

“That will never happen,” soothed Elfreda. Despite herself, she pictured Georgina with her fox-colored hair slinking through the house.

“Never.” Papa agreed, but his glare was all for her again. “He won’t. He can’t. Remember that. Should he prevail with you, I shall raise my voice to declare to one and all, I have no such daughter .”

Disquiet swept through her. It was horrible to hear Papa disavow her, even hypothetically, even knowing he misperceived the Major’s threat in every way.

She shifted, restless, poised to tell him he’d met the other Redmayne, the more dreadful one, the girl, but something held her back, the desire to spare his pride, and spare herself his outburst.

Surely not the desire to protect Georgina.

“He will not prevail,” she murmured. “I will always be your daughter.”

Papa’s expression softened. “Yes, child. And I would not part with you, even to a man more worthy. You know you have my preference among your sisters.”

He’d said as much before, many times, and in the past, she’d reveled in his regard, and felt its rightness. It meant he recognized her as cut from the same cloth.

Tonight, she felt her disquiet increase.

She had to give herself a mental shove to regain her focus. She shuffled the papers again. These papers deserved her attention, and his.

“This section.” She cleared her throat. “This section about the wretched heathen men. It says they made their camp not a mile from the abbey. They left behind a hoard, and two nuns discovered it. They hid it again, fearing the army would return. What if it’s still there? A hoard, Papa. Imagine the objects.”

In the little silence that followed, she perused Papa’s person for hints of excitement. The tilt of his head was promising.

He reached out and tugged the papers from her hands. He walked closer to the nearest candle, and for a long, tense moment, he read.

Finally, he looked up.

“Drivel. Rubbish. Balderdash.”

Elfreda’s teeth sank into her lower lip. She felt her heart bump each rib on its painful descent toward her stomach.

“Your face is long as a parsnip.” Papa gave a sudden laugh. “Well, I have news that will put more apple in your cheeks. William Aubin-Aubrey is coming to Derbyshire. I had a letter this afternoon. He praised the diagrams of the tumuli in Two Dissertations . And promised to back me for president.”

“Mr. Aubin-Aubrey praised the diagrams?” Elfreda’s hands clapped together.

William Aubin-Aubrey was known as the Barrow Prince.

He was one of the younger Fellows, a man with a true genius for antiquity, the author of the book she kept on her bedside table, Sepulchral Anecdotes .

And he’d praised the diagrams— her diagrams!

For she’d drawn almost all of them, the ones in her dissertation, and most of the ones in Papa’s.

“Will you tell him about the camp on the bluff?” Her face was all apples now. “Papa, will he dig with us?”

Papa tossed Grandmama’s papers onto the library table. “He plans to open barrows in the Peak. I’ve been invited to go with him, and I’d intended to extend the invitation to you. But if you’d rather chase after figments, you are welcome to stay here and swoon over pebbles and nuns.”

“It wasn’t a pebble.” Elfreda heard the pleading note in her voice. “And Mr. Aubin-Aubrey will—”

“Here.” Papa strode across the room and tugged a book from the shelf. “Take this, to cleanse your mind. I will test your declensions in the morning.”

The book was Edward Thwaites’s Grammatica Anglo-Saxonica .

Elfreda took it. But when the clock chimed midnight, she crept into the library and retrieved Grandmama’s papers, and it was those papers she read, until her candle stub burned out.