It was a relief, really, not to have to pretend any more. Mona meant well, but all this talk about curses and hauntings just gave Dulcie the creeps. ‘Words cannot conjure bad luck,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Words are simply tools for communication.’ After a lifetime of Lucy, whose vaguely Wiccan faith tended to absorb just about any supernatural belief that caught her fancy, this ethos – the creed of the scholar – was Dulcie’s defense. It was also, sometimes, a little hard to believe when everything seemed to be going wrong all at once. ‘A text, any text, is a vessel.’ She let herself wax lyrical as she emerged from the elevator, three levels below the yard. ‘A way for a story to be carried – and a means by which a reader can be carried away.’ She’d meant to cheer herself up. After all, how many times had she enjoyed being transported by a good book – by The Ravages of Umbria in particular? But as she pictured the two-hundred-year-old novel, she couldn’t help thinking of its author.
