Read Chapter 7: The Wound Reopens

The chapel smelled of lilies and damp wool, a combination Eliza would forever associate with death. St. Aldate's was half full, the pews populated by a curious mix of gowned academics and dark-suited strangers—Marcus's family, she assumed, though she couldn't tell which of the black-clad figures claimed him. The Archai had gathered in a discreet cluster near the back, a study in controlled mourning. Julian stood at the edge of the group, his face a careful mask of sorrow, his hands clasped in front of him like a man holding a sermon.

Eliza had chosen a seat three rows behind them, close enough to observe, far enough to feel untethered. She hadn't slept since the crypt. Since Julian's confession. Since Marcus's body had been found with his owl ring missing and his suicide note too neat, too staged. She pressed her gloved fingers together and watched the widow.

Marcus's wife was small, birdlike, her veil so thick Eliza could only glimpse the pale oval of her face beneath it. She did not weep loudly. Instead, she stood at the coffin's head during the eulogy, her hand resting on the polished oak as if she were steadying herself against a rocking ship. A man beside her—her brother, perhaps—kept a hand hovering at her elbow, ready to catch her.

Julian's gaze kept drifting to her. Not with the sympathetic detachment of an old colleague, but with something sharper. His jaw tightened each time the widow's shoulders shook. When she finally lifted her veil to dab at her eyes, revealing a face that must have been beautiful once but was now drawn and sallow with grief, Julian flinched. Just a fraction. A muscle jumping in his cheek.

Eliza filed that away.

The service ended with a hymn she didn't know, and the congregation filed out into the gray Oxford morning. Marcus's coffin was loaded into a hearse destined for the cemetery, but most mourners lingered in the churchyard, exchanging murmured condolences. Eliza hung back, watching the Archai cluster.

Whitmore was there, of course, his silver hair gleaming like a warning. He spoke to Julian in low tones, their heads bent together, and Eliza noticed the way Julian's eyes flicked to her across the gravel path. He gave a slight shake of his head. Whitmore followed the gesture, and his gaze landed on Eliza with the weight of a ledger being opened.

She turned away, pretending to study a gravestone that had toppled with age.

"Dr. Hart."

The voice was soft, female, and close. Eliza turned to find one of the Archai members—a woman in her fifties with iron-gray hair cut in a severe bob and glasses that magnified her eyes to an unsettling degree. Professor Miriam Okonkwo, the society's medievalist. Eliza had noted her at the initiation but they'd never spoken.

"Professor Okonkwo," Eliza said, keeping her voice level. "I'm sorry for your loss. Were you close to Marcus?"

Okonkwo's lips pressed together. "We were colleagues. He was difficult, but he was *ours*, if you understand me. The Archai protects its own."

Eliza tried to read the statement. It could have been grief. It could have been a warning.

"He was working on something, before he died," Okonkwo continued, dropping her voice. "A manuscript. He'd been such a bore about it at our last meeting—wouldn't share the details, said it was too sensitive. I assumed it was the usual Marcus dramatics. But now I wonder."

"Why?"

Okonkwo glanced around, ensuring none of the other mourners were near. "His executor contacted the Bodleian this morning. Marcus had promised them a bequest—a rare volume he'd acquired years ago. But when they went to collect it from his rooms, it was gone. The bookshelves had been cleared of anything related to his research. Everything." She paused. "Marcus was a hoarder, Dr. Hart. He didn't lend. He didn't sell. And he certainly didn't tidy."

Eliza's pulse quickened. "Someone took his research?"

Okonkwo's magnified eyes studied her. "That's what I'm saying. The coroner called it suicide. But suicides don't usually arrange for their manuscripts to vanish first."

The widow's brother was calling for Okonkwo—a lift to the cemetery, something about carriages. Okonkwo placed a gloved hand on Eliza's arm. "I'm telling you this because you're new. And because new people sometimes *see* things that old ones have learned to ignore." She squeezed once, then released. "Be careful, Dr. Hart. The Archai has a way of swallowing those who look too closely."

She was gone before Eliza could respond, crossing the gravel to join the widow's party.

Eliza turned back toward the church, her mind churning. A vanished manuscript. A widow who made Julian flinch. A society that protected its own. She was still standing there, frozen in thought, when Julian appeared at her side.

"You should come to the reception," he said quietly. "It would look strange if you didn't."

"Why do you care how it looks?"

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he watched the widow climb into the funeral car, her brother's hand still at her elbow. "Her name is Grace," he said finally. "Marcus used to call her his anchor. Said she kept him from drifting too far."

"Were you close to her?"

Julian's jaw tightened. "I knew her before Marcus did. We were at Cambridge together—Grace, me, Tom. A long time ago."

The name landed like a stone in her stomach. Tom. Julian's missing brother. The photograph in Eliza's hidden folder, the boy with the owl ring whose face she couldn't place.

"Grace was Tom's friend," Julian continued, his voice clipped. "When he disappeared, she blamed me. I don't think she ever quite let go of that."

Eliza studied his profile. "Is that why you sent me to find the crypt? Because you feel guilty about Tom?"

Julian turned to look at her, and for a moment, the mask slipped. Beneath it was exhaustion, grief, and something else—something that looked almost like fear. "I sent you to find the truth," he said. "Because I'm tired of the lies."

He walked toward the reception before she could ask which lies he meant. Eliza stood alone in the churchyard, the wind picking up, pulling at her coat, and she had the distinct sensation of standing at the edge of something she couldn't yet name.

---

The reception was held in a college hall that smelled of furniture polish and regret. Long tables had been dressed with white cloths, and silver trays of sandwiches circulated among the mourners like nervous birds. Eliza accepted a cup of tea she didn't drink, offering the appropriate sympathetic nods to colleagues she barely knew.

She positioned herself near a cluster of Marcus's fellow scholars, a group of middle-aged men who seemed more at ease discussing manuscripts than memories.

"Terrible business," one of them said, adjusting his spectacles. "Though I can't say I'm entirely surprised. Marcus had been erratic for months. Whispering about conspiracies, claiming he'd found something that would upset the whole apple cart."

"Found what?" Eliza asked, keeping her tone conversational.

The scholar gave her a wary look. "He wouldn't say. Crowing about it, more like. Said he had something that would make his name. Make someone else's ruin."

The man beside him snorted. "He was always claiming that. Remember his 'discovery' about the Bodleian charter? Turned out to be nothing but a rumor he'd overheard in a pub."

Eliza's teacup paused at her lips. The charter. Stolen from the Bodleian just before Marcus's expulsion. The archivist had told her about it—the founding document of the Archai, vanished from its display case.

"Did Marcus mention the charter specifically?" she asked.

The first scholar frowned. "Mention it? He wouldn't shut up about it. Said he knew where it had gone. Said he'd been the one to find it, which was why they threw him out. Something about the society—"

A cough interrupted him. Whitmore had materialized at Eliza's elbow, his smile as thin as paper. "Dr. Hart. I didn't expect to see you here."

Eliza's hand tightened on her cup. "It's a public funeral, Professor."

"Indeed." Whitmore's eyes were flat, assessing. "I merely wondered if you'd had time to consider my earlier request. The tablet, I mean. Time is rather of the essence."

The scholar next to Eliza fidgeted, suddenly aware he'd been speaking to someone Whitmore deemed important to watch. He muttered an excuse and drifted away, leaving Eliza alone with her academic nemesis.

"The tablet," Eliza repeated. "My work on it is proceeding." A lie. She'd done nothing since fabricating that footnote—she'd been too busy with crypts and corpses.

Whitmore tilted his head. "Proceeding. Good." He leaned closer, and his voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "I hear Marcus's papers have gone missing. A shame. He was always careless with his sources."

Eliza didn't flinch. "I wouldn't know about that."

"No," Whitmore agreed, his smile widening. "You're simply a promising classicist who attended the funeral of a man you barely knew. How admirable."

He drifted away before she could respond, leaving her with the uncomfortable sense that he knew far more than he should. She watched him join Julian by the window, the two of them exchanging words she couldn't hear. Julian's face was unreadable again, the mask firmly in place.

Grace had retreated to a corner, hemmed in by well-wishers offering empty condolences. Eliza caught her eye for just a moment—a flash of something sharp beneath the veil's edge—before the widow looked away.

Eliza set down her untouched tea. The hall felt smaller now, the murmur of voices pressing in on her. She needed air. She needed silence. She needed the clean, cool anonymity of the Bodleian's reading rooms, where manuscripts didn't vanish and dead men didn't haunt the conversation.

She slipped out the side door, letting it close behind her with a soft click. The corridor was empty, lined with portraits of long-dead dons who stared down at her with painted disapproval. She walked quickly, her footsteps echoing on the stone.

Why did Grace look at her like that? Why did Whitmore know about the missing papers within hours of Okonkwo's information? And why had Marcus, in his final days, been crowing about a discovery that would ruin someone's name?

The answers were buried somewhere in the debris Marcus had left behind. But if the police had cleared his rooms—if the manuscript had been stolen—then the evidence was already fading.

Eliza reached the outer door and pushed it open, stepping into the cool morning air. The cemetery service was beginning; she could see the black cluster of mourners gathered around a fresh grave. She watched from a distance as the coffin was lowered, as Grace threw a handful of earth that scattered across the polished wood like dark rain.

Julian stood apart from the mourners, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed. He didn't approach Grace. Didn't offer comfort. He simply watched, and his face held a grief that seemed far too old for the loss of a man he'd helped expel.

Eliza turned away. Whatever Julian's story was, she wouldn't get it from his expression. She'd have to find it in the fragments Marcus had left behind. The manuscript, the charter, the debt—they were all threads leading somewhere dark.

She walked back toward the college, the city rising around her, patient and ancient and full of secrets.