Page 48 of What Happens at Nightfall

Angele dei, qui custos es mei . . . The words rang like chimes, clear and sweet.

“It was just something I must have remembered from somewhere. I don’t even know what it means.” Jess rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She was tired, that was all. Tired and imagining things. “What did you say that thing was the symbol of?”

“The Brothers of the Hermetic Order of the Brass Twilight,” said Ingrid impatiently. “Cornelia’s son Horace Vanderwilt joined up with them while he was an undergrad at Princeton. It was kind of a mash-up of Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, alchemy . . . like a grab bag of the occult. They were just a bunch of harmless boys playing at rituals, but I think it’s what gave Cornelia the idea to raise a demon.”

“Raise a demon,” repeated Adam. “So what you’re saying is that my kids’ great-great-grandmother was a diabolist?”

“Exactly,” said Ingrid, pleased that Adam had understood so quickly.

His grade was clearly rising from a B to a B+, or even an A-, thought Jess giddily. Demons 101, offered Sunday nights. Prerequisite to Advanced Encounters with Evil, offered Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

“The sources are blurry, but it seems likely she saw her son’s occult activities and realized that these rituals could be turned to darker uses. Here at last was a way to regain her family’s lost standing and ensure prosperity for future generations. All she had to do was summon a demon and bind him to her will.”

“Oh, sure,” murmured Jess. “Nothing big. Just a trifle.”

“This all still works under the assumption that demons are real,” said Adam flatly.

“Can you still doubt it after what we saw tonight?” demanded Ingrid. “I’m still working out the details of how she bound the demon—there are some papers I still need to access—but there can be no doubt that the pact took effect on the night of December fifth, 1876. You know. The night of the Brooklyn Theater Fire?”

“I don’t know,” said Adam. “I know there’s a monument here in Green-Wood but that’s all I know about it.”

There was a crackling in Jess’s ears. Flames devouring velvet and plaster, canvas and wood. Men with long poles, shouting, beating at the flames. Embers jumping, igniting, and behind it all, laughter. Terrible, terrible laughter.

“As the name suggests,” said Ingrid, “the Brooklyn Theater Fire was a fire in a theater in Brooklyn. It happened between the fourth and fifth acts of a play called The Two Orphans. Accounts vary, but something like three hundred people died, give or take a few.”

Jess gripped the seat of the chair with both hands. There was no fire here. The dials on the stove were all turned to off. The white walls were clear and unmarred.

“That fire did not start naturally. It did not spread naturally. Fire hoses were unaccountably unreachable and exits were unaccountably blocked. It was slaughter,” said Ingrid emphatically. She stopped and thought for a moment. “No. It was worse than slaughter. It was a sacrifice.”

“I thought—” Jess licked her dry lips. “I thought nineteenth-century theaters were always dangerous places. Because of the gas lights.”

Adam nodded vigorously in agreement.

“A gas light didn’t start this fire,” said Ingrid definitively. “Horace died in the theater fire. It’s unclear what the price was meant to be, whether it was her son’s life, or all the lives, but either way, Cornelia fulfilled her half of the bargain. After that, everything the Vanderwilts touched turned to gold again. Horace’s daughter married a British earl and his son built a fortune that rivaled the Rockefellers’. Cornelia stopped sending out invitations after that, but that only made her more sought after. An invitation to the old Vanderwilt brownstone was more coveted than a place in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. Meanwhile, her old rivals suffered misfortune and disgrace. I have a dossier,” Ingrid added. “I can show you the details.”

“Isn’t that the normal way of human fortunes?” asked Jess, weakly trying to cling to some pretense of normalcy. “People go up and people go down?”

“The Vanderwilts,” said Ingrid bossily, “were abnormally lucky.”

“Except my wife,” said Adam. “She wasn’t very lucky.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Ingrid blithely, ignoring the rising tension in the room. “I’ve looked her up. Perfect grades at Spence, lead in every school musical, secret society at Yale, magna cum laude from Yale Law . . .”

“Killed at thirty-six,” said Adam, his voice clipped, “leaving behind two young children.”

Jess put her hand on his arm, feeling the tense muscles beneath the worn fabric of his shirt. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” he said.

To give him a moment, Jess said to Ingrid, “What even makes you think Cornelia Vanderwilt was involved in the Brooklyn Theater Fire?”

“Oh, that’s easy.” Ingrid pulled up another picture on her phone, angling it toward Jess and Adam. “See that? This was a picture that ran in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. You can see, that’s the theater, with flames coming out of all the windows, and there’s the huge crowd of people who made it out, milling around outside. If you zoom here”—she pulled the image to one side, widening it so they had a close-up of the bottom left corner—“look who’s there.”

At the forefront, a mustachioed man grasped a swooning lady. Behind them, her features unmistakable, even in grainy newsprint, stood Cornelia Vanderwilt. The hood of her opulent opera cloak had been thrown back. The elaborate parure of jewels that adorned her head, neck, and ears was the same she wore in the Fagnani portrait that now hung in the Met.

“Can you make that larger?” asked Adam, squinting at the screen.

“Here.” Ingrid passed the phone to Adam, who, after a couple of false starts, managed to enlarge the section he was looking for.