Canterbury, 2025
Isabelle Harper didn't remember falling asleep in the attic. But when she woke, dust clinging to her lashes and her fingers curled around a cracked leather journal, she knew something had changed. It wasn't just the weight of the air—it was heavier now, humming like the pause before a thunderstorm—but the silence. The kind that listens.
She sat up, Evelyn Bellamy's journal pressed to her chest, her heart thudding in time with an echo only she could hear. The last line she'd read haunted her:
"He marked us both. Margaret with death, and me with remembrance."
Something sharp and familiar stabbed beneath her ribs—grief or truth, she wasn't sure which.
Downstairs, her footsteps creaked against the floorboards of the house on St. Dunstan's Street. This had once been her childhood home. Now, it was just a shell, like everything else she'd trusted. Her father's study door stood ajar. Dust motes hovered like secrets in the morning light.
Isabelle stepped inside.
The walls were lined with the same old books, the ones her father never let her touch. But today, something was different. A book—Keats, the same title mentioned again and again in Evelyn's journal—lay open on the desk, as though someone had just been there. She hadn't left it open.
Tucked inside was a page not from the book, but from Evelyn's hand.
"The vault lies beneath the Bellamy tree, where memory bleeds into stone."
Before she could question what that meant, the scent hit her.
Lavender and tobacco.
She spun around. No one. But the smell lingered, like a ghost pressing against her skin.
"You're not supposed to be here yet," a voice murmured. Male. Calm. Cold.
Isabelle's heart seized. She turned slowly—and for a moment, she saw him in the reflection of the glass bookcase. A tall man with a cane, standing behind her. His reflection stared back even as the room stood empty.
She ran.
Out into the cold air, her breath fogging, heart hammering. The journal clutched tight in her hands. Beneath the gnarled tree in the backyard—the one her father called the Bellamy tree—she dropped to her knees, dirt stinging her palms.
She dug.
Minutes blurred. Fingers raw, nails cracked, until they struck something hard: a rusted metal box.
Inside: a stack of letters bound in red silk, brittle and whisper-thin.
On top, a portrait—broken at the edges. A woman with eyes like Isabelle's. The name on the back read: Margaret Elwood.
And beneath that, one final note, in Evelyn's hand:
"To the one who finds this—know that the fire was not mine. The truth was never buried in ashes. It was hidden in blood."
Isabelle didn't cry. She didn't speak. She simply sat there, beneath the tree, as the wind picked up and the whispers returned—no longer haunting, but inviting.
She was ready now.
Ready to finish what Evelyn Bellamy began.