Vivienne Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

The wax seal still sat on the table between them. Esther had given Vivienne the mark, but not the name. Vivienne watched her cousin straighten a row of books that were already straight. Grief did that. It kept the hands busy and the mouth shut. Marcus leaned by the door, saying nothing, letting the two women work it out. "You read the final page," Vivienne said. "You know the composer's name. You're holding it back." "The book is gone," Esther said. "What I remember doesn't matter." "It matters to me." Vivienne drew a folded paper from her coat. She set it beside the seal and smoothed it flat. A broken fragment of a score. Printed staves, careful notes, and between the lines the same crawling symbols that blurred her eyes. "I've carried this for years. I know what the music does. I know why you locked part of your collection and threw away the key." Esther stopped fixing the books. She looked at the fragment a long time. "Where did you get that." "A sender with no name. Same as the one who took your codex, maybe." Vivienne tapped the symbol on the page, then the symbol in the wax. "They match. You saw it too, the night it was stolen. That's what frightened you. Not the theft. What the theft meant." Esther sat down. She pulled off her glasses and pressed her thumbs to her eyes. For a moment she looked older than the room. "I translated that book for three years," she said. "The composer wrote his own name in his own mark. When the thief left the same mark, I understood. He isn't gone. He came back for his work." Vivienne reached into her collar and lifted a thin silver locket over her head. She laid it in Esther's open hand. "Our grandmother's," she said. "You wanted it once. Take it. I came here to find a name, but I'm not leaving a cousin alone with this." Esther turned the locket over. Her thumb found the mourning scrollwork along its edge. She was quiet. Then she set it down, careful, and met Vivienne's eyes. "Thorne," she said. "Aldous Thorne. He signed the codex with that symbol. He died a hundred years ago, by every record I could find." She looked at the fragment again. "But a dead man didn't walk into my library." Marcus pushed off the wall. "So he's alive, or someone wears his name." "Either way," Esther said, "he has my book now. And he knows how to play what's on your page." Vivienne folded the fragment and slid it back into her coat. She finally had the name. But the name opened a worse door. The composer was not a ghost in an archive. He was here, breathing, and he already held the one thing that could break the curse or finish it. Now she had to find him before he used it.