For a man who had been so obviously close to death a few hours before, Mr. Grenville looked remarkably well when Olivia saw him again. That wasn’t saying a great deal. He was still lying in bed and very pale, but his eyes focused when he saw her, and he smiled. Joan was actually sitting in the chair by him rather than pacing.
She still looked like she wanted to hit someone.
A bouquet of pink roses lay in her lap, wrapped in several layers of white cloth. “I didn’t touch it bare-handed,” Joan said when she saw the direction of Olivia’s gaze, “and I don’t think anyone else did. It was still on the floor of the carriage. Have a look.”
With most of her remaining magical strength, Olivia invoked her sight again and peered at the flowers. To her surprise, she saw nothing overtly sinister there—nothing like the light that had attacked Simon—but the roses didn’t look normal either. In the aether, they were gray shadows of themselves, bleached and drained of all vitality. When Olivia looked at them again in the normal world, the blossoms were already beginning to decay.
“They were…wrapping,” she said, reaching for a metaphor. “Concealment. The spell was the package.”
“Bloody good package,” said Mr. Grenville, his voice hoarse. “The thorn went straight through my glove.”
“Should I—?” Olivia started to rise, thinking of defenses. “All the students are indoors and being watched, but if there’s more someone should do…”
Mr. Grenville shook his head. “Not just now. The wards hold. Anyone who could get past them wouldn’t have bothered with roses.”
The door opened again. It could have been a maid, it could have been one of the students, but Olivia knew it was Gareth even before she glanced backward and met his eyes.
Any hopes she’d had about their attraction dying out now that they’d acted on it had clearly been vain ones. The time and place quelled some of the energy Olivia felt when she looked at Gareth, and so did her exhaustion, but it was still there, like a faint but constant whisper.
She looked down quickly, and Gareth looked past her, letting his breath out as he approached the bed. “Simon…my God, you’re a quick healer.”
“Mostly your doing, old man,” said Mr. Grenville and then gestured to Olivia. “And Mrs. Brightmore’s. So Joan tells me, at any rate. You both have my deepest thanks. I rather suspect I owe you my life.”
Customers had been effusive in their gratitude sometimes. Women had clung to Olivia and wept, and men had made all sorts of melodramatic speeches. Compared to them, Simon’s thanks was almost curt. But Olivia blushed and couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment.
“What in the name of God was that?” Gareth asked even more abruptly than Olivia might have expected for such a question.
“St. John, if I say more than ‘a curse,’ you won’t understand and you won’t want to know,” Mr. Grenville replied. He reached for the glass of water on the bed stand, sipped, and went on. “And I’m afraid I don’t know much more than that, in any case. We had come off the train from London, and John was just bringing the carriage around. Joan got in first. I was about to join her when someone called my name—Miss Talbot.”
“Rosemary Talbot?” Olivia asked, though she would have found it just as hard to believe Rosemary’s sister had been involved in this affair.
Mr. Grenville nodded. “We spoke a little. She—” He shook his head. “Some of the specifics are blurred now. I probably could have remembered more before I was ill. She was very friendly, very pleasant. Now I think there was something off about her, but…hindsight taints these perceptions.”
“And she gave you these?” Gareth gestured to the roses in Joan’s lap.
“She told me to give them to my wife,” said Mr. Grenville. He spoke bluntly and without inflection in his voice, but Olivia caught the glance that passed between him and Joan.
Joan shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I was the target. Young women here wouldn’t give a man flowers for himself. She was very enthusiastic about something, though. I didn’t hear her speak, but she put a hand on your shoulder for a second.”
“That’s…not usual,” said Mr. Grenville and sighed. “But it’s not exactly damning either. Perhaps she was eager for news of my sister. Or she’d just become engaged. I wish I could recall more clearly.”
“Do you know where she got the flowers?” Gareth asked. “Perhaps someone from London. Someone who heard you were looking into the Ripper.”
“No,” said Mr. Grenville. “Joan was right. There’s no magic in the killings.”
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t any around them,” Joan said. “Flies gather. And we didn’t keep our return a secret. Talbot makes a much better dupe than she does a magician. If someone on an earlier train gave her the flowers—”
“We’ll have to talk with her,” Olivia said.
She stood and went toward the window, where she could see a thin line of darkness between the blue velvet drapes. She knew about the purpose of the school. The aim wasn’t simply teaching children to control their powers. However, until now, any outside threats had been purely theoretical. Her hands were cold, as if she’d pressed them against the window glass and held them there.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” she said to the window.
“Take St. John, then,” said Joan. “He’s tangled with the curse. He might be able to see its tracks. Also, he can probably shoot,” she added and turned to Gareth with no apparent apology for talking about him like a piece of furniture. “Can you?”
“Barely,” said Gareth.
“Better than not at all. I’d go myself, but if Simon’s wrong, and that’s been known to happen, something might try to hit us here. I’ll need to be here if it does.”
Any other two men Olivia had known would have protested the idea of a woman trying to fight off whatever forces were behind the curse. She didn’t hear any objections, though. When she turned from the window, Mr. Grenville was actually grinning at his wife with both affection and confidence.
Gareth, Olivia suspected, was less happy about Joan’s plan, but he knew her too well to speak against it. So did Olivia, for that matter.
“Who do you think might have planned this?” she asked.
“I couldn’t say,” said Mr. Grenville, “not with certainty. We mostly encountered stories in London. Some of the groups we heard of may exist. Some may be as old and as bloody as people claim.”
“But, at the time, there was nobody who looked like an immediate threat,” Joan said and grimaced. “We’ll have to revise that now, obviously. But who would’ve noticed us and decided Simon needed to die and gotten an agent down here before we did? We didn’t even get in any fights.”
She sounded almost disappointed.
“You might not have had to,” Olivia said. “If someone knew about Englefield already and thought you were expanding your interest…maybe. However, it does seem odd.”
She leaned back into her chair. Now, after a sort of love and a sort of war and all sorts of worry, exhaustion was creeping into her bones. She resisted the urge to lean her face against the plush and fall asleep.
“We shouldn’t tire you,” Gareth said. He spoke to Mr. Grenville, but Olivia thought he’d glanced at her first. She straightened up and tried to look alert. “If we can’t do anything before tomorrow—”
“You can tell me what happened while we were gone,” said Simon. “I think I probably have the strength to hear it.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Gareth.
***
“This place was a monastery once,” Simon said when Olivia had finished her account of the forest. “Dissolved sometime in the 1540s, so we can blame old Henry VIII for most of our troubles. My enterprising ancestors took a heavy hand with anything that looked too connected to Rome. I think the only remnants of the original are the foundation and your monk.”
“Your monk, really,” said Gareth.
“I somehow don’t think he’d take that well,” said Simon. “I’m surprised there weren’t more…dramatic events in the history after Brother Jonathan died.”
Olivia, who was looking remarkably tired and remarkably lovely at the same time—rather unfair, to Gareth’s mind—shrugged. “Perhaps there were,” she said. “Perhaps the people responsible left, one way or another. If you couldn’t exercise your powers without them getting out of control, you’d probably move away too. Or they stopped doing anything outdoors near the forest, and the land had some chance to repair itself. Then most people stopped believing—”
“Until we started a school here, full of exactly the kind of people who would try magic outside”—Mrs. Grenville sighed—“or ask her students to do it.”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Olivia. “Besides, it’s better that we found out when we did. Otherwise, the power out there could’ve fed something even worse than Michael’s storms. As it was, it very nearly did,” she admitted, startling Gareth with her forthrightness. “Waite and Fitzpatrick summoned Balam yesterday.”
“Did they?” Gareth wouldn’t have quite called Mrs. Grenville’s expression surprised. One didn’t describe a lion as surprised when it spotted an antelope came in sight. “I see.”
There was a world of promise in those words, and Simon clearly heard it. He laughed and winced at the same time. “Try not to kill our students.”
“I damn near didn’t have the chance. I wish I had pictures to show them. Visual aids always work better.” Mrs. Grenville sighed again, directing it at the world rather than herself this time, and turned back to Olivia and Gareth. “Everything’s all right, though? Nobody’s hurt?”
“Nobody’s hurt,” Olivia said. “And I sent Balam back. I haven’t really dismissed many demons. There was some strange resistance there toward the end, but I don’t believe I left him a passage back here.”
Gareth thought again of the shadow he’d seen. Perhaps Balam had been calling in reinforcements? He wasn’t sure how demons worked, and he hadn’t seen either the demon or the shadow since.
“You’ll have to give me more details soon,” Simon said. “I’ve never dismissed a demon before, not one that was incarnate physically, and certainly not one of the Ancient Lords. Well done.”
“I was fortunate,” said Olivia, “to get there before he’d fully manifested.” She glanced over at Gareth then, subtly and just for an instant, and raised one eyebrow.
Somewhere in the last few months he’d learned to read her face. She would tell the Grenvilles what had happened. They needed to know, but she was giving him the chance to speak first, to be the one to tell his part of it.
Gareth fought back the absurd urge to take her hand.