Later that afternoon, burdened with story and sneezy with dust, Mary and Charles entered the Marylebone house. Allegra was on her way up the stairs as Miss Cumberland was on her way down, and at the top loomed the eerie dark-browed doctor. Peebs stood immediately behind Mary.

“Leeches!” said Allegra. “There were leeches.”

“Best thing for fever,” said the doctor in his strange accent. “Leeches.”

“Horrible squirmy black things,” added Allegra. She noted something disturbingly leech-like in the doctor himself.

“Is Ada awake?” Mary asked.

“A little,” answered Allegra. “She’s not making any sense. She sort of mumbles and falls asleep again. But she’s asking for you.”

“Can I see her?”

Miss Cumberland nodded, trotting down the stairs to what must have been her hundredth kettle boiling of the day.

“John?” asked Peebs of the doctor, who gave a slow, resigned shrug, as though to slough off the dread that clung to him like a fog.

“The worst is over, I suspect,” the doctor said. “But the child is very weak.”

The grim fellow let himself out without a further word, leaving only the echo of a chill in his wake.

“You know him?” asked Allegra.

“Doctor Polidori was a friend and traveling companion of your father’s—one of the few the baroness has yet to exile, evidently,” said Peebs. “Now, why don’t you tell me about the leeches?” And he led her off to the library, out of everyone’s way. Charles followed Peebs, as it seemed the only appropriate thing to do.

Mary wondered where Jane had gotten to.

As soon as Mary entered Ada’s room, she felt that something was terribly wrong. Before her was something she’d never seen before: Ada’s floor.

Gone were the mushrooming mounds of drawings and plans, the hunks of machine parts and disassembled gears, stray rusty tools, and upturned inkpots. Instead there was just…floor.

Mary looked past the still-sleeping Ada in the bed to Mrs. Woolcott, beside her.

“What have you done?” Mary asked.

“I’ve just tidied up a bit, dear, not to worry.”

“What have you done?”

“Well, you can’t have thought it was like that all the time, can you?” answered Mrs. Woolcott. “Ordinarily I’d smooth out her papers and run them to the attic, and she’d take them to the balloon. But I see you’ve done away with that. She must miss it terribly.”

“She does, and who are you?” Mary asked rudely.

“Miss Godwin, I do realize the circumstances are extraordinary, but there is simply no cause for such an accusatory tone. I was not the one who led to the destruction of Lady Ada’s balloon—”

“No, who are you, really?” Mary was quite beside herself.

At this, Ada stirred. Mary rushed to her bedside, and Mrs. Woolcott picked up a glass of water.

Ada’s eyes fluttered, and opened slightly. They reminded Mary of glass marbles.

“Miss Coverlet?” croaked Ada, her lips parched from fever.

“Here. You hush now, Ada. Don’t try to speak. You’re a bit woozy from the leeches, so best rest up now.”

Ada looked slowly around the room.

“Mary?” she said.

Mary realized she was squeezing Ada’s hand very tightly, and that she was crying.

“I’m here. Oh, Ada, I’m so glad you’re awake. There’s so much to tell you—”

“A secret wife,” mumbled Ada weakly as she was drifting off. “Find the ghost. Find…the will.”

The mention of a will shot a chill through Mary—echoes of the words of the ghost girl. There was a knock on the open door.

“Mary?” said Jane, the great grey newspaper in her hand. “You’ll wish to see this.” Mrs. Woolcott shot Jane an icy look.

“Not now, Jane,” said Mary in a hush. But Ada was already asleep, grey and raspy.

“No, honestly, now. It’s the afternoon paper, and it just arrived. Look.”

Jane crossed the too-empty floor like a ship with a large grey sail in front. “Here,” she said, shaking one hand to show Mary the page. The words were tall and narrow: ESCAPED LUNATIC APPREHENDED.

“It’s your ghost,” said Jane. “At the hospital, part of the College of Physicians in—”

“Regent’s Park,” Mary finished.

Mary’s mind raced. How could Alice be apprehended and the story in the newspaper already? She’d seen her just this morning!

“Enough, girls,” scolded Mrs. Woolcott. “Lady Ada needs rest, not a newspaper. Now out, the pair of you!” Mrs. Woolcott gathered linens and headed off to fetch more, attempting to herd both Jane and Mary out of the room.

“I beg your pardon,” said Jane, exasperated, “and I do realize we keep asking this of you, but who are you, exactly, that you know such things?”

Mrs. Woolcott looked as though she were about to be cross with Jane but then shrugged slightly. “You know who I am. But I think you mean to ask who I was, which is to say Miss Coverlet, Lady Ada’s nurse and governess since she was a baby—and, I suspect, since I was scarcely older than yourself, Miss Mary.”

At this bit of information the floor of Mary’s brain became slightly less cluttered and, she dared to think, slightly less hazardous. It was about time something started making sense.

“Miss Coverlet,” Mary said. “You left to marry, and therefore you left service, and this very household, now to return as Mrs. Woolcott.”

“As you say, Miss Mary. Now may I attend to these linens?”

Mary nodded and realized that she still clutched the jumble of notes from her expedition in her chilled hand, among them Ada’s list that was both Roman numerals and not, because of the Greek.

She took the scrap of paper and laid it on the desk, flattening it out as best she could, and slid it back beside a polished brass lamp, seeing her own fingers upside down and distorted in the metal’s reflection.

But so too was the message on the paper. The Greek letters, the larger of the Roman numerals. Upside down in the reflection, it almost looked like—

“Mary?” Ada murmured, waking. “I’m hungry.”