the others are too powerful. Tonight, I shall follow my baby boy by my own hand for I have no other hope for escape.
Scarlett let out a heavy breath, her shoulders dropping. Holy Christ. Her heart ached. For a moment she simply sat staring, unseeing, at the disorganized junk in front of her. She’d known this house had a past but she hadn’t known such cruelty and suffering had filled the halls of Lilith House. A mild shudder went through her. One of the Bancroft sons had made Narcisa Fernando into his unwilling mistress, she’d borne a child of his, and then because of a physical abnormality, he had left him to die in the woods?
Good God, the unthinkable evil of that was almost too much for Scarlett to bear.
Narcisa had been right—her baby’s blood father was a monster.
And he’d come by it honestly. His ancestors hadn’t been any better, if not far worse.
She looked at the papers enclosed once again in the suede covering, and the journal. Had Taluta, who had once been kept captive in the house, written out her story during the time she was there? That had to be it . . . Scarlett didn’t imagine that native people had the type of paper and ink pen Taluta had used. Then later, Narcisa, who’d come to live in the Bancroft house had found Taluta’s writings and translated them, leaving the few necessary facts of her own time at Lilith House?
She’d intended on taking her own life. Hadn’t Camden mentioned something about a limp? Had she attempted to harm herself but only come away with an injury? A picture entered Scarlett’s mind of a woman, arms held wide as she pitched her body from an upper story window. She shook her head, dispelling the image that had to have come purely from her imagination.
Scarlett bit at her lip, a feeling of deep sadness settling on her skin just as the dust in the basement had coated the trunk where two women’s brutal stories resided.
With infinite care, Scarlett set the two items down on a clean spot on the floor and went back up on her knees, peering once again into the trunk and pulling out what appeared to be old photos, each encased in a thick paper frame. The first one was of a man in his mid-fifties with silver hair and distinctive sideburns. He sat looking to the side, his mouth set, expression stern. Scarlett pulled the photograph from its covering and turned it over. H. Bancroft was printed in the bottom right corner. Hubert Bancroft. Scarlett turned it right side up and stared at the man for a moment, thinking about the things she knew about him, the evil deeds he’d performed, the lives he’d ruined. She turned the picture back over and returned it, face down this time, to its frame.
The next few photographs were of Lilith House in various stages of construction. Scarlett looked through these with interest, noting the things that were different about the house in its infancy, and the things that remained unchanged.
Under those was a photograph that looked just as old as the original Lilith House photos. It was of five figures dressed in what looked like ancient war garb. A deep shiver went down Scarlett’s spine. One of the figures wore a horned headdress, two held long, sharp spears, another was dressed entirely in furs, a mask that looked like a pointy bird beak covering his face. Could this be a picture of the man Camden had mentioned to her? The one who had donned an outfit just like this before he died, and now supposedly wandered the woods beyond?
She set it aside, but paused for a moment, waiting for the deeply unsettled feeling to pass before moving on.
The next photograph was of a group of men, all wearing similar white suits standing in front of Lilith House, a photograph she’d seen before hanging on the wall of Sister Madge’s office. She studied it close up now, looking at the men who stood shoulder to shoulder, one more austere than the next.
She removed the photo from its frame and looked at the back. Religious Guild, was written in the corner in the same handwriting as had been used to identify Hubert Bancroft on the back of his photograph. She turned it back over, her eyes moving from one face to the next. Hubert Bancroft was in the center. She recognized his stern expression and those notable sideburns. Something