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manwalk.”
    The room was small and lined with tall shelves of books. Two chairs flanked the hearth. She settled Larch in the only one with a seat free of books. After shifting a stack of leather-bound quarto volumes, she sat in the other, edging as close to the fire as she could get. The heat felt good after a walk in the chill December night.
    Larch frowned. “You should not be involved in this matter, Miss Cooper. Tom Cannon is out there, and he is dangerous.”
    “Tom wanted to get into the academy. He wanted to get to someone or something.” She pulled a pistol out of her coat pocket and set it on her lap. She’d taken it from the groundskeeper’s cottage—a simple matter when no one in Wollaston bothered to lock his door. The Webley was large for her hand, but at least it was less conspicuous than the huge fowling piece that was her only other choice. “He might succeed next time. Nothing is going to get any safer if I hide under my bed.”
    Dr. Larch muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like a curse. Then he considered her, his gaze keen and assessing, more the soldier he had once been than the old churchman he was now. “You are an unusual and somewhat disturbing young woman. Even so, I don’t think your gun will stop a dead man.”
    “Most things slow down if you shoot them through the eye.”
    “I concede the point.” Larch nodded, seeming much steadier. Maybe her disturbing qualities were helping.
    “Tom—he—it—was at the school, trying to get in. And eating another arm.” She couldn’t help a moue of disgust from wrinkling her mouth. She suddenly felt hot, as if she might be sick again just from thinking about what she’d seen.
    “The dead appear to have unforgiveable manners.”
    She wiped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Where is he getting these corpses?”
    “From family graves. Several have been disturbed.” Larch nodded at the heavy tome on the floor. “Since I discovered the wreckage, I’ve been reading about the habits of the walking dead.”
    Evelina wrinkled her brow. “There’s a book about it?”
    Mary chose that moment to enter, rolling a tea trolley. It was one of the new steam-powered models that chugged along with only the lightest touch. She poured and left, muttering to herself about the explosion of paper on the floor. Evelina took the opportunity to move the large book to the safety of the desk. It smelled old and musty, the pages foxed and spotted with damp. A quick glance at the frontispiece told her that it was not Hester Barnes’s spell book as she had first thought, but a history.
    “I found that among the oldest volumes kept in the collection of the rectory,” said Dr. Larch. “I’ve been doing what research I can. It’s all I can do, until someone else accepts what is happening.”
    Hope, tiny and tentative, made her caress the faded brown writing. Hope that his research would help her. Hope that she had the power to help him.
    The penmanship of the history was so old-fashioned, she could barely read it. “What does it say?”
    “It is from the time of the Great Fire, so the prose is rather antique. They seem to have had a positive plague of the walking dead until much of London burned. They called them the Risen. Fire seems to be the one reliable method of destroying the creatures.”
    Evelina put a mental tick against the first item she had come there to learn. “Why werethere so many?”
    Larch watched as she resumed her seat, still watchful. She was probably the only other person who believed that Tom Cannon had left his grave, but she was still, in his eyes, little more than a child. She could see him weighing his words.
    “Sorcery was rampant among the cognoscenti of the time,” he said. “It fell out of fashion along with the Stuart kings … or at least that seems to be the case. I had just reached that part when you arrived.”
    Evelina moved on to something more useful. “Do the dead eat living