An Inquiry Into Love and Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother or any member of the male sex laying eyes on it.
    I hurried down to the kitchen to light the stove. I was relieved to see that Toby had laid by a good stock of wood, if he had not bothered with much else; I could at least make tea and warm a few rooms in the house. We’d had few servants as I grew up, just a daily cook and a weekly washerwoman and maid, though we could have well afforded more—one of my parents’ many eccentricities. It meant I could lay a fire as quickly and neatly as any girl I knew.
    I pulled open the stove door and stared.
    Lying squarely in the cold stove, carefully placed in its grimy, unlit darkness, was a book. It lay open to a place in the middle, its pages flat and unruffled. It was thick, its binding of brown leather.
    I stared at it for a long moment. It seemed to mock me, lying there. There was no reason for it—and yet, there it was.
    I reached in and slid it out, careful not to flip the pages. A glance at the title page revealed
A History of Incurable Visitations
, by someone named Charles Vizier. I read the page where the book had been left open.
    . . . A second translation of
De Spirituum Apparitione
, produced in Cologne in 1747, terms the most disturbing manifestations as
grappione
, or nearly demoniac in nature, though the specific demonic influence has not been classified. Certainly such accounts have been disputed over the years, though there is little doubt that the Abbey of Sénanque experienced one such visitation, consisting of thrown crockery, overturned rain barrels, and even ghostly slaps and pinches assaulting nighttime guests—which persisted over the course of several decades.
    I stood reading, my body paralyzed by a strange sort of fear. It was only a book. I forced myself to read on.
    Though possibly demonic, the account of the
grappione
at Sénanque also bears resemblance to the traditional Scottish haunt called a
boggart
, or sometimes
bogey
, a mischievous—sometimes vicious—manifestation tied to a single place, and often terrifying the inhabitants of any area in which it takes up residence. . . .
    I closed the book and placed it on the table. I took out the watch from last night, which I had put in the pocket of my sweater, and looked at it. A watch on the table. A book in the stove.
    I put the watch next to the book and strode out the kitchen door to the back garden. The sun was up now, the sky turning a crisp autumn blue. The cobblestones were cold and rough on my bare feet. I turned and looked up at my bedroom window. Just as I’d seen this morning, there was nothing there, nothing that could have scratched the glass. I stepped closer, peered into the remains of the dead garden that bordered the house. There were no footprints or telltale points of a ladder. I swept my gaze farther, into the dried weeds and nettles, looking for trampled spaces. There was nothing.
    You could have dreamed it
, I told myself.
You must have dreamed it. You must have
. Still, I backed farther into the garden, away from the house, stepping around a heavy ceramic vase full of soil and dead flowers, and directed my gaze upward. Could someone have climbed down from the roof? Somehow scaled the other gable to get to my window? An animal, perhaps? I shaded my eyes against the sun and squinted. Had it all been in my mind?
    “Excuse me!”
    I jumped and turned, nearly overbalancing. Standing beyond the stone wall of the garden were two women, an older and a younger. Though they were dressed differently, their faces marked them as mother and daughter. The mother gave me an apologetic wave. “I’m so sorry to have startled you. We were passing on our morning walk and couldn’t resist stopping to say hello.”
    I let out a breath. The fence wall was nearly shoulder-high, which made conversation awkward, so I walked to the gate and unlatched it. “Of course,” I managed. “Do come in. I’m Jillian Leigh.”
    “Diana Kates,” the woman said as she approached and held out