As Lottie hared out of the Grandstand without a word, I realised how utterly exhausted I was. The thought of following her was borderline impossible; I couldn’t get my limbs to move the way they should.
I wanted to sink and sink into the delicious armchair, kick my feet up on the claw-footed coffee table, and sleep for approximately a thousand years. The fire was crackling and smelled of woodsmoke, and the whisky in my throat burned so sweetly. There were iced cinnamon cookies in little bowls while traditional Christmas songs played in the background, and the massive fir tree in the corner shone with multicoloured fairy lights and the fake gold-wrapped presents at its feet.
As I looked around the bar – at the oak-panelled parlour-room walls, the antique dartboards and marble chessboards and faded snooker tables, the enormous oil paintings of sunshine-yellow fields – it seemed to me that the whole place felt like Lottie. Warm and open and fun.
‘Come on, we should humour her,’ said Hafsah, hauling herself up from the burgundy Chesterfield just as ‘Silent Night’ started choralling through the speakers. ‘She thinks she’s Scooby Dooedrealgood this time.’ A half-hearted laugh. The bags beneath her eyes told me she was as tired as I was. Splitting your soul in two and dealing with the dramatic consequences was apparently harder work than it looked.
‘Fine,’ I sighed, draining the rest of the whisky and laying the tumbler down on a round glass side table. I felt very young and very old all at once. ‘But you don’t have to come with me. Escape back to Foxglove while you still can. At least one of us should get some rest.’
Hafsah obliged, and I traipsed out to the library alone. The air outside was violently cold, and my breath plumed around me.
By the time I passed through the cloister and scanned into the library it was after midnight, but Feathering was behind her desk as usual. Now that I understood the source of her angst, I no longer felt the need to slit her throat. Her stony expression gave nothing away, but I knew that just a few metres away, in the secret room beside the North Tower, Mordue was undergoing the transformation in a locked room. Were Santos and Baptist there too? And when would Feathering complete her own ritual?
I found Lottie kneeling on the floor of the philosophy section, where Feathering had knocked me out all those weeks ago. She leafed furiously through a large, leather-bound volume I didn’t recognise, searching for something only she understood. ‘Everything all right?’ I asked, flopping into the chair nearest to her. Every muscle in my body ached with exhaustion.
‘There!’ Lottie exclaimed triumphantly, stabbing a title page with her forefinger.
I frowned at the oversized serif font. It read:
The Fallacy of Female Violence
A Study in Divine Command Theory, Demonic Possession and the Sixth Deadly Sin
By Alistair E. Dacre
‘Read,’ Lottie ordered me, shoving the book into my hands. She sank her bum backwards on to the ground, kicking her long legs out in front of her. I shook away a mental image of Feathering scrubbing at the old wooden floorboards to remove every last trace of my blood.
Forcing my stinging eyes to focus, I started to read. It was dense and heavy-going; Dacre had an old-fashioned writing style, one that smacked of pretension. But after a few paragraphs of meandering intro, I hit the meat of the text, and my heart began to beat a little faster.
It was a philosophical essay on why women are so often violent when violence itself is an inherently male trait. Violence, he posited, was fuelled by testosterone, which activated the subcortical area of the brain that produces aggression. And so because women produced relatively little testosterone, it followed that they should also produce relatively little violence.
He then went on to clumsily interrogate the societal, cultural and religious factors that could account for this ‘unnatural’ phenomenon of female anger. Could divine command theory explain it? Were violent women acting according to God’s will? Because God was male and thus his anger was physiologically sound? If this was the case, then surely it followed that the only acceptable place for women to exhibit anger was in spreading the Lord’s message.
His conclusion was this: all angry women were either godly or possessed.
The whole essay was pathetically binary and reductive. I felt a kind of oily repulsion settle in my stomach.
Such wrath isn’t very becoming of a young woman, you know.
As I looked up, Lottie was studying me intently, gauging my reaction. The cogs of my brain cranked begrudgingly into action. ‘I mean, why have you even read this in the first place?’
Lottie’s cheeks flushed furious red. ‘I found your course reading list. And I knew you thought I was stupid, so I wanted to prove you wrong by casually dropping philosophy references into conversation.’
‘Okay, let’s skip over that for now, on account of how embarrassing it is for you.’ I held up the book, noticing distantly that my hand was shaking. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Right, this is going to be an almighty stretch, but hear me out?’ Lottie asked.
I smiled, warmed to my bones by the idea of her sneaking into the library to read philosophy books so she could prove herself to me, and by the fact she was still asking me to hear her out even though she was intellectually streets ahead at this point.
All I managed was a nod.
‘Dacre’s book was published in the seventies,’ she said, gesturing to the imprint page. ‘So let’s say ten years later, Mordue discovers the ritual book in a little shop in town, brings it back to her office and leaves it on her desk. At this point, we already know that female violence in a religious setting is a specific research interest of Dacre’s. So maybe he’s waiting in her office for a meeting, and he sees the title of this book about soul purification and anger and possession and religious rituals, and he’s intrigued. He flips through it, finds it interesting, but probably dismisses it as nonsense. It’s about a supernatural soul purification ritual, after all.
‘But then, over the next few weeks, there’s a change in Mordue. Like you, she must have always been tightly coiled. Alwayssimmeringwith anger, but then suddenly she’s placid and cool. Dacre wonders if maybe she performed the ritual – and, impossibly, that itworked. He starts to study her movements, his interactions with her, tries to fit it into his own quite frankly batshit musings on divine command theory and demonic possession. He doesn’t want this incredible research opportunity to end, so he tears the reversal pages from the book.’
From her seat on the floor, Lottie looked up at me expectantly, almost nervously, and I was momentarily stunned by her brilliance. She had made connections that seemed so obvious now that she’d made them, but that I would never have put together no matter how long I agonised over it.
Really, it should have been me who pieced it together. Dacre had even requested to be my mentor. It was right there from the start. And yet it was Lottie who had figured out that Dacre packaged his own disdain for angry women into a religious missive, and was now exploiting it to further his own career, to make money, to raise his own profile. He was no better than the exorcists and witch doctors of Loudun – or the male writers who turned those stories into cheap entertainment for the masses.
Lottie’s brain was fierce and bright, and loathe as I was to admit it, I was jealous. Not just of her brains, but of her goodness, her kindness, her sunny smile. That easy zeal. That fearlessness.
I was jealous, or something else entirely.
‘So you think Dacre still has the reversal ritual pages?’ I asked, barely allowing myself the glimmer of hope.
She tilted her jaw upwards, eyes shimmering. ‘I think he has much more than that.’