She tucked the Lexicon beneath her arm. “I’d like to ask a favor.”

He turned away and began rifling through the papers on his desk, appearing to accomplish nothing in particular aside from creating a bigger mess. “I thought I made myself clear this morning. I’m not going to help you get yourself killed.”

“I just want to borrow some books.”

“And this suspiciously sudden impulse has nothing whatsoever to do with Ashcroft?”

Elisabeth spotted some fragile glass instruments arranged on a table nearby. She climbed back down the ladder and drifted toward them. “What are these?” she inquired. “They look breakable.”

“Don’t touch those,” Nathaniel said hastily. “No—don’t touch that, either,” he added, as she changed course and headed for the jeweled globe instead. When she ignored him, he threw his hands up in surrender. “Fine! Have it your way, you absolute terror. You can borrow as many grimoires as you want, as long as you keep your hands off everything else. That’s the rule.”

She beamed. He stared at her for a moment, and then snapped his gaze back to his desk.

“What is it?”

“You need some new clothes,” he said, pretending to read one of the papers. She knew he was pretending, because the paper was upside down. “I’m going to run out of pajamas at this rate. I’ll set Silas to the task—he loves that sort of thing. Prepare to be fashionable, Scrivener, because he’ll accept nothing less.”

Elisabeth reddened. She had forgotten she was still wearing Nathaniel’s dressing gown. She tried to push away the memory of his dark eyes and parted lips, only inches away from her own. “The way you talk about Silas . . . you really trust him, don’t you?”

For some reason, Nathaniel laughed. “With my life.”

It took her a moment to grasp his answer’s double meaning, and when she did, her heart fell. It was easy to forget that he had bargained away his life in exchange for Silas’s service. How much of it? She couldn’t bring herself to ask.

She shook off her troubled thoughts and bent herself to the task ahead. As Nathaniel resumed his work, she climbed the study’s ladders, plucking out any grimoire that looked promising. The light shifted and deepened, slanting through the skylight at a steep angle. Hours passed, but Elisabeth barely took note. She was back where she belonged, surrounded by the whisperings and rustlings of pages; the sweet, musty smell of books. Occasionally she looked down to see what Nathaniel was up to, and found him examining conjured butterflies and flowers beneath the lenses of a queer-looking magnifying device. He never once looked at her in return. But every once in a while, when her back was turned, she could have sworn she felt his gaze settle upon her, as tentative as the brush of a butterfly’s wing.

Late in the afternoon, she staggered out of the study with such a prodigious stack of grimoires that she had to tilt her head to see around them. Climbing three flights of stairs to her bedroom didn’t seem wise. Instead, she hauled the books into a room she had discovered during her exploration: a tiny parlor tucked into a warm, sunny crevice of the manor, its plump armchairs arranged around a fireplace in which someone had left a bouquet of dried lavender, the flowers now brown and brittle with age. She set the grimoires down on the coffee table, sneezing in the cloud of dust that puffed from its surface.

A review of the Lexicon had led her to focus on Aldous Prendergast, the author of the Codex Daemonicus. The books she’d selected to start with were all Class One and Two grimoires with sections on sixteenth-century history. One of them looked especially promising: Lady Primrose’s Complete Handbook of Historical Personages, New and Revised Edition, which kept emitting delicate, ladylike scoffs at the dusty table, and refused to open for her until she went back and borrowed a pair of kidskin gloves from Nathaniel.

By nightfall, however, the grimoires had yielded disappointingly little information. She’d read that Prendergast had devoted his life to the study of demons and the Otherworld. He was obsessive about his work, even going so far as to claim that he had traveled to the Otherworld, which appeared to be the beginning of his falling out with Cornelius. The two were close friends before Prendergast wrote the Codex. Soon afterward, Cornelius had him declared mad and locked him away in a tower, where he died after lapsing into some sort of comatose state. It was not lost on Elisabeth that Ashcroft had attempted to get rid of her in much the same way. No wonder the volume’s psychic howls had raged with fury and betrayal.

But none of the grimoires contained what she really needed: a clue as to what sort of secret Prendergast might have hidden inside the Codex—or, barring that, where she could find a copy of it to study.

Frustrated, she set the last grimoire aside and looked out the windows. It was almost too dark to continue reading. A bluish gloom had descended over the parlor, and the traffic had grown thinner outside. Her thoughts churned away as a carriage rattled past, shiny with rain, bright yellow leaves pasted to its roof. Thus far, the attacks on the Great Libraries had occurred about two weeks apart. That meant she had barely over a week left to expose Ashcroft before he attacked the Great Library of Fairwater, and less than a month until he targeted Harrows. She had barely begun, and already she was running out of time.

“Miss Scrivener?” She jumped. Silas stood at the entrance to the room, holding a silver tray. “I have taken the liberty of bringing your supper, unless you would prefer to move to the dining room.”

Elisabeth hurried to clear a spot on the coffee table, ignoring Lady Primrose’s indignant huffs of protest. “This is fine. Thank you.” She watched Silas set the tray down. Earlier, she had ventured into the kitchen and seen no one. “Do you cook all the food here yourself?”

“Yes, miss.” Silas lit the oil lamp in the corner, then went to draw the curtains. It was strange to see him perform such mundane tasks. His pale, slender form looked ethereal in the twilight, barely human. “I have served Master Thorn in every capacity these past six years.”

I’m even eating meals made by a demon, she thought in dismay. Nevertheless, she owed Silas her life. It didn’t seem right that he should wait on her hand and foot. “Would you . . . would you like to join me?”

He paused, head tilted. “Do you wish me to?”

Elisabeth hesitated, unsure what to say.

He considered her through his lashes. “I do not eat human food, miss—not without a reason. To me, it tastes of nothing but ash and dust.” He tugged the curtains shut. Before they closed, she noticed that his breath didn’t fog the glass. “But I will dine with you, if you wish.”

Had she offended him? It was always so difficult to tell. “In that case, I won’t trouble you.”

He nodded and made to leave.

“It’s very good,” she blurted out. “I’ve never eaten this well except in Ashcroft Manor, and I’d prefer to forget about that. You’re an excellent cook, though I have no idea how you manage it, if you can’t taste anything.”

Silas drew up short. She winced, hearing the clumsy words over again, but he didn’t look insulted by her blundering praise. If anything, a hint of satisfaction showed on his alabaster features. He nodded again, more deeply this time, and vanished into the shadows of the hall.