The Librarian's Spell by Patricia Rice (ebook offline reader TXT) 📗

teardrop fell on her arm. Mr. C didn’t move.

She brushed his bearded face, tucked his overlong white hair behind his ear, and whispered words of encouragement.

For one brief second, she thought he squeezed her fingers. And then his chest stopped moving.

She didn’t need a physician to know he was gone—his journal was already whispering to her.

He’d left it on the table instead of holding it.

Royally spooked, Max searched the stone arch for any secret opening he might have missed and found no means of entering. Determined to find answers, he returned to the darkened castle in search of his elusive host. Walking through solid stone was just not done. He needed to know the trick. He wanted inside that tower.

Entering through the side door Lydia had first shown him—did no one ever lock doors here?—he saw no light burning downstairs. Since there were few servants to lock doors or light lamps, those tasks were probably neglected. He liked that there wasn’t a bevy of maids hovering, so he wouldn’t complain.

He checked the office where he’d found Lydia once before. Embers glowed in the grate. She or her employer must have been here recently.

Mr. Lloyd was slumped in a chair beside the fire, fast asleep. That seemed ominous.

A gray cloak hung on a hook behind the door. Did that mean the old man had returned here by some secret passage?

To hell with looking for secret passages. Max started up the narrow stone tower stairs. He couldn’t see beyond the next bend as he climbed , but when he reached the final turn, he saw light under a door at the top.

It looked like a good hiding place for a reclusive librarian. If the old man could startle the daylights out of Max, Max could return the favor.

He raised his fist to knock. The door swung open with the brush of his knuckles. “Mr. Cadwallader?” He didn’t like entering without permission.

A soft sob greeted him.

Max knew he wasn’t a demonstrative man. Weeping women caused him to turn on his heel and head the other way.

But the door opened wider to reveal Lydia curled in a wing chair, weeping her heart out, and he couldn’t bear it.

She didn’t even look up. Momentarily flustered, unable to shed the fear of women flinging themselves at him when he entered a room, Max warily studied his surroundings.

The gray-cloaked, white-bearded figure he’d seen below lay in a small bed against the wall. The room was almost overheated, but the man was buried in covers.

Max tried to correlate the figure he’d seen in the cellar with the one he saw here. He was very good at sizing up situations, but this one added up to the impossible.

He crossed the room to check the old man’s pulse. There was none. He was cold to the touch, which meant the librarian had been dead for a while. The chances that Mr. Cadwallader had run down a set of stairs to warn Max and run back up to die—zero.

He was wearing the cloak over his chest like a blanket, just as the. . . apparition. . . in the cellar had.

He’d seen a ghost. Max shivered a little, but he was a pragmatic man. The living came first.

He turned to Lydia. She clung to one of her ancient tomes, hugging it to her chest as if it were a child. He hated emotional scenes, never knew what to do, but he couldn’t just abandon her.

“Should I bring up Mr. Lloyd?” he asked tentatively.

She shook her beautiful sunset curls, sending a few more tumbling. “There’s nothing can be done until morning.”

“Would you like me to sit with him so you can get some rest?”

She shook her hair again.

At a loss, not wanting to mention ghosts at a time like this, Max drew up a chair in front of hers. The apparition had said to take care of her, that she was more valuable than she thought. If that was a man’s dying wish, he should listen. “Is that a book you can read to me?”

That startled her. Her liquid blue gaze jumped from him, to her dead employer, and down to the book.

“It’s Mr. C’s journal. It’s calling to me,” she whispered. “It never did that before. That’s how I knew he was gone.”

“Books call to you?” he asked, trying to hide his skepticism.

His doubt flew right over her head. The curl near her ear bounced as she nodded again.

“Mr. C’s journal never spoke to me before, because he was alive. Your. . . journal. . . isn’t really a book and you’re alive, so I don’t hear it. But all those volumes in the library. . .” She gestured helplessly. “They whisper, but I can’t hear the words.”

“Is this one talking any louder than those?” It didn’t matter if he believed her. She’d stopped weeping. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?

She thought about it, then reluctantly nodded again. “But it could just be me wishing it was saying ‘open me’ because I want to so badly.”

Out of curiosity, Max pried the book from her elegantly long fingers. She released it without a fight, watching him as if he held the secrets to her heart’s desire.

“It’s all right for me to open the journal now because he’s no longer alive?” At her reluctant nod, he opened the first page to see how badly the words swam.

Pretty badly. The librarian had written in a precise, ornate script, with so many loops and swirls they threatened to make Max’s head pound. He flipped through to see if there was any interesting formula or drawing of the tower. The writing deteriorated as it progressed. Near the end, he discovered shaky but large square block letters.

He handed the book back to her. “Start there.”

Her thick, reddish-brown lashes flapped in surprise. Gently, as if the old leather was a precious jewel, she took the book back.

She traced her name—Max had been able to read that much clearly in the plain print. Then she took a deep breath and began to read, to herself.

Fair enough. Max