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“A most peculiar young woman visited me yesterday. Miss Metcalfe, she called herself. Well-schooled in Arthurian legend, though far too young to have gained such knowledge through proper study.

She inquired about borrowing my first edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, the one recently gifted to me by an appreciative patron to further my studies.

I informed her that while it is indeed a first edition, it differs markedly from Sir Thomas’s original script in Middle English. The printed version, I explained, cannot capture the nuances of the handwritten text.

She became quite agitated at this news and warned me that Regis Aeterni, a name I confess means nothing to me, might not understand my point of view about the book. Most disturbing, she suggested that a sect of this Regis Aeterni, the Dominus, can be violent when thwarted.

I fear I may have stumbled into matters far more dangerous than academic scholarship.”

Silence followed Gabriel’s reading. Angelo felt the weight of those words—“violent when thwarted.” They were not simply chasing artistic legacy. They were treading in territory where others had died. Silence fell for several minutes as the weight of this realization settled like a shroud upon the diners.

“Have you heard from this Miss Metcalfe since?” Lorenzo eventually asked, his voice tight.

“No,” Gabriel replied. “And inquiries have revealed nothing about her. She seems to have vanished as mysteriously as she appeared. But Metcalfe is a common surname, particularly up north, and so it is not the clue it could have been. Perhaps if we knew her first name …”

“Perhaps she was a warning,” Henri suggested. “Perhaps this Dominus sent her to test whether your tutor understood what he possessed.”

“No, the killer turned out to be a misguided, power-hungry fool who had found an old journal of one of its members buried in the archives of the Bodleian Library. I have sent someone to search the stacks, but it is a large place and the directions weak …” Gabriel did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.

Lorenzo sighed deeply, the sound carrying all his frustration and renewed determination. “So here we are at Grimsfell, with a well-engineered secret room and no path to the next clue. What do we do next?”

“We search for the sigil,” Angelo said firmly. “Systematically. Carefully. The library first, as I suggested, then the other rooms. If Matteo embedded one clue in this hall, he may have embedded others.”

“Ever the optimist,” Nicholas muttered. “Like some sort of cherubic angel in a Raphael painting. All golden optimism and impossible faith.”

“Someone must provide encouragement,” Angelo countered, refusing to let his uncle's cynicism dampen his spirits. “Otherwise, we are merely wandering about complaining about our circumstances.”

“A fair point,” Gabriel said before Nicholas could respond. “We begin tomorrow, then. A systematic search of the public rooms, looking for any symbol or sigil that might match the one we found in the library.”

The meal concluded shortly after, with agreements to meet in the library after breakfast to begin their search. Angelo noticed that Lorenzo looked more animated than he had since viewing the Hall of Reflections. Having a concrete task to focus on had revived his spirits considerably. It was a terrible thing that his friend was unraveling his family’s past, only to be thwarted by the incessant dripping of water on rock, destroying the carving that had led them this far.

As they dispersed to their chambers, Angelo found his thoughts returning to the mysterious owner of Grimsfell Hall. Someone who maintained it meticulously. Someone who might be watching even now as they planned their search.

Someone who had stood at an upper window that afternoon, observing as Angelo explored the kitchen garden.

He paused in the corridor, looking up at one of the ubiquitous iron grates. “Are you listening?” he asked quietly, not really expecting an answer. “Do you know the secrets we seek? Or are you as much a prisoner of Matteo’s puzzle as Lorenzo is?”

No response came. Only the eternal whisper of wind through hidden passages and the distant song of the cliffs.

But Angelo could not shake the feeling that someone, somewhere in the walls of Grimsfell Hall, had heard him.

And perhaps was wondering the same things he was.

Isolde sat locked in the run along the dining-room wall. Cold had gone through the wool of her cloak and into the bone.

They know.

Not her name. Not yet. But they knew Matteo di Bianchi. Knew Regis Aeterni. Knew the trail laid over Britain like crumbs through a wood that bit.

She had known it in a thin, bookish way. Hearing the whole of it spoken aloud was another thing. Words in a passage had weight that words in a journal did not. They brought home what her people were. Guardians. Meant to keep and, somehow, to show the way to … She caught her lip until she tasted iron. The cloak itched at her throat. She did not loosen it. Cold was a useful reminder. Softness was how a girl started hoping.

Her guests meant to follow those crumbs to the end.

Papa would have been sick with it. He would have found a means to turn them, to send them off, to keep what the Fairfaxes had held three hundred years.

How? Augustus Fairfax had had a public face. Learning. Charm when he chose. He could stand as owner. He could command. He could persuade or press as the hour asked.

Isolde had none of that. She could not show her face without the flinch, the pity, the stare.