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I narrowed my gaze. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I, but here we are.” Violet turned to me, an unreadable emotion in her eyes as she traced my face—searching for answers. “She loves you, you know.”

I screwed my face up. “I don’t underst—”

“Your mother blamed herself for you ending up in England, for not protecting you better in New York. I think she believed by helping Manon she could make amends for her not protecting her own children.”

I buried my face in my hands. So that was why she’d stayed away, not tried harder to come back. She’d found a purpose here. One she thought she’d lost with her daughters.

The ashes had grown long on my cigarette. I knocked them to the ground. “What now?”

Violet leaned her head back against the bark of the old tree and swallowed hard. “I will expose him. Every horrible thing that man did will be laid bare for the world to see. He will pay for what he did to these people here.”

I glanced back to the hospital, to the window of von Keller’s study. The haunted expression must have been written all over my face.

“I’m glad you killed Crawford. You did what I failed to do.” She reached out, touching my hand. Her skin cool and soft against my own. “And Ruby, there’s something else…”

I turned back, not sure what to make of this peculiar woman.

“I believe you saw Félix entering von Keller’s office yesterday.”

I jerked my head around to face her. Mouth open to ask the question.

“I saw him too. In places he ought not have been. Places he had no reason to be. He’d appear and disappear like a ghost. I … I don’t know what to make of it, but in my research about the patients here at the hospital I did find this…”

She slipped a piece of newsprint into my hands. It was old and damaged, dating from November 1914—listing out the known dead and missing from the Yser Front. Belgium and her allies had managed to hold that small piece of her homeland—stopping the German army on its Race to the Sea.

Violet reached over pointing a finger midway down the page, and I hastily skimmed to see what she saw.

Félix Thys, 20 years of age, dead.

He’d been an adjutant. My finger ran over the page—as if the weathered newsprint would give me answers. “How can that be?”

“That is a very good question. Either our friend Félix is not who he claimed to be—or—”

“Or we’ve seen a ghost?”

She let out a strangled laugh and raised a shoulder. “Ghosts are more your purview than mine. If you ever figure it out—be sure to let me know. It’d be a hell of a story.”

I stood, offering her the paper, but she folded my fingers back over it. “Keep it. I just wanted you to know … no matter what they said in there … I believe you.”

As I stood there in the priory green that morning I realized two dreadful things. First—Ruan Kivell was damnably, terribly right. Violet Devereaux and I were not different at all. And second, perhaps more shocking of all, I actually liked the woman.

“I sense this won’t be the last time our paths will cross, will it?”

“One never can tell, Ruby Vaughn. One never can tell.”

EPILOGUE

IT took more than three weeks from that fateful day in Saint Oda before I returned to the home Mr. Owen and I shared in Exeter. My first stop was London to speak with Hari in preparation of Manon coming to live with us. Sister Agathe promised to visit her cousin regularly, but she could not join us here. Her calling, she said, was to remain at the children’s home. Manon had lost so much during the war and in the years after. I could never make amends for her past, but I could give her a brighter future and provide the protection only Mr. Owen’s title and my fortune could allow. Who would notice a child witch in the household of an eccentric antiquarian viscount and a scandalous heiress? She would be downright ordinary by comparison. Once I explained my intention, Hari set off at once for Belgium to help put things in motion.

Ruan and I remained in London long enough to see Hari off and then head to Lothlel Green to figure out how the devil the two of us were supposed to raise a young pellar. It was best, we decided, for her to remain in Exeter with Owen and me and be raised like an ordinary soon-to-be nine-year-old girl. Mr. Owen could school her on folklore and the otherworld, and during school breaks and holidays, I would bring her to Cornwall, where Ruan would teach her what he knew about being a pellar and how to control her abilities. She would be safe. And yet the parting sentence in my mother’s letter bothered me. Their curse is our responsibility. I understood it now no better than I had when I first read it.

I remained with Ruan in Cornwall longer than I’d intended, long enough to make certain the melancholy that followed him to Belgium had remained in the same muddied and frozen fields that had threatened to take everything from us. The chicken, however, came home with him.

He called her Hortensia. And she was a precocious and silly little creature whose feathers had finally started to grow back in. Fancy that, Ruan returned with a pet, and I’d returned with a child witch. Somehow, I sensed he had the easier task.

I’d spent the better part of the drive back to Exeter trying to figure out how tell Mr. Owen I was about to have a ward. Correction, we would have a ward.