I grinned. “Let’s find out.”
I placed my candle into an empty sconce on the wall and slipped my fingers into the small space between the wall and the bookcase. Noelle did the same, our arms interlacing.
“One, two, three,” she said.
We pulled, and the bookcase swung open like a door. Behind it was another door, small and white, with a keyhole just above the doorknob.
My mouth was completely dry. “Try it,” I said.
Noelle whipped out the key again and shoved it into the lock. She looked me in the eye and turned. The click was so loud we both jumped. She turned the doorknob and the small, wooden door swung open with an eerie, groaning wail. I’d never seen Noelle look so scared in my life.
“Get the candles,” she said, her breath short and shallow.
I did as I was told and handed her one. We held them both out in the doorway. Their flames danced as they illuminated the top of a slim, winding staircase.
“Okay. So maybe the old bat’s not entirely off her rocker,” Noelle said.
“Unless we’re about to walk into a tomb full of dead bodies,” I replied.
Noelle narrowed her eyes at me. “Thanks for that image. That’s exactly what I needed right now.”
Then she took a deep breath and stepped onto the staircase. It creaked beneath her weight, and she pressed her free hand into the wall to steady herself.
“Wait,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go down there?”
“All that matters is what lies ahead, right?” she said over her shoulder. “What’s the matter, Glass-Licker? Ya scared?”
I rolled my eyes. “Lead the way.”
So she did. Slowly, carefully holding on to the wall all the way, we descended the winding staircase into the ice-cold basement of the Billings Chapel. At the base of the stairs, we each held our candles out in front of us, the flames flickering like wild now, since our arms were trembling.
The room was a perfect circle. Tapestries decorated the walls, and a set of chairs stood in a smaller circle, all facing a thick, wooden book stand that was directly at the center of the room. I took a breath and counted. There were exactly eleven chairs.
“Maybe the BLS didn’t hold their meetings upstairs in the actual chapel,” I said quietly, staring at the bookstand. I could just imagine Elizabeth Williams standing behind it, the Billings Literary Society book open in front of her. “Maybe they held them here.”
“This is it?” Noelle asked. “This is what she sent us here to find? A basement and some old chairs?”
“Wait a second.” I took a couple of steps into the room, reaching my candle out in front of me. “There’s a book on there.”
Noelle and I glanced at each other. That same sizzle of anticipation I’d felt back in the presidential suite went through me now. Together we walked forward, sliding a pair of chairs aside to enter the circle. We parted at the bookstand and walked around it, coming together again in front of the open book.
The pages were yellow with age and covered in dust. I reached out one hand and swept it across the pages, clearing an arc of the tiny script. My heart caught as I recognized the handwriting.
“Elizabeth,” I breathed. “This is Elizabeth Williams’s book.”
Noelle reached out and closed it, kicking up a huge cloud of dust. The silt filled my nostrils and mouth and we both coughed, waving our hands in front of our faces as the air cleared. When it did, we stared down at the inscription in the center of the leather cover, the words as clear as day. Whatever I’d been expecting, whatever I had thought Mrs. Lange was talking about when she’d told us we were special, that Billings was special—when she’d asked us if we’d ever wondered why—it had not been this.
The inscription read: THE BOOK OF SPELLS.
Even at the tender age of sixteen, Elizabeth Williams was the rare girl who knew her mind. She knew she preferred summer to all other seasons. She knew she couldn’t stand the pink and yellow floral wallpaper the decorator had chosen for her room. She knew that she would much rather spend time with her blustery, good-natured father than her ever-critical, humorless mother—though the company of either was difficult to come by. And she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that going away to The Billings School for Girls was going to be the best thing that ever happened to her.
As she sat in the cushioned seat of her bay window overlooking sun-streaked Beacon Hill, she folded her dog-eared copy of The Jungle in her lap, making sure to keep her finger inside to hold her place. She placed her feet up on the pink cushions, new buckled shoes and all, and pressed her temple against the warm glass with a wistful sigh. It was September 1915, and Boston was experiencing an Indian summer, with temperatures scorching the sidewalks and causing the new automobiles to sputter and die along the sides of the roads. Eliza would have given anything to be back at the Cape house, running along the shoreline in her bathing clothes, splashing in the waves, her swim cap forgotten and her dark hair tickling her shoulders. But instead, here she was, buttoned into a stiff, green cotton dress her mother had picked out for her, the wide, white collar scratching her neck. Any minute now, Maurice would bring the coach around and squire her off to the train station, where she and her maid, Renee, would board a train for Easton, Connecticut, and the Billings School. The moment she got to her room in Crenshaw House, she was going to change into her most comfortable linen dress, jam her floppy brown hat over her hair, and set out in search of the library. Because living at a school more than two hours away from home meant that her mother couldn’t control her. Couldn’t criticize her. Couldn’t nitpick every little thing she wore, every book she read, every choice she made. Being away at school meant freedom.
Of course Eliza’s mother had other ideas. If her wishes came true, Billings would turn Eliza into a true lady. Eliza would catch herself a worthy husband, and she would return home by Christmas triumphantly engaged, just as her sister, May, had.
After two years at Billings, eighteen-year-old May was now an engaged woman—a
nd engaged to a Thackery, no less. George Thackery III of the Thackery tanning fortune. She’d come home in June, diamond ring and all, and was now officially their mother’s favorite—though truly she had been so all along.