Opening
Shaken by the Maidens’ revelation that Zoe is one of them, Mariana Andros tries to keep her balance as Edward Fosca needles her into rashness. A late-night visit with Fred veers from confessional intimacy to an unsettling proposal, while an attack from Henry Booth brings the danger to her doorstep. By morning, another Maiden is dead and a chilling postcard sets the murders squarely within Greek tragedy, even as Mariana’s heart remains tethered to Sebastian.
What Happens
Chapter 66
Mariana reels from the discovery that her niece belongs to the secret circle. Betrayed yet determined to be strategic, she reads Fosca’s disclosure as a deliberate provocation meant to unsteady her. She decides not to confront Zoe while angry and walks the college grounds to cool her head.
Fred intercepts her with concern and a bottle of hall-plundered Burgundy. He invites her to his room for a quiet drink. Tired and needing distraction, Mariana weighs the impropriety against her frayed nerves and accepts.
Chapter 67
Fred’s room is immaculate but papered with equations and drafts of a book. Family photos—parents, a solemn boyhood portrait—dot the space. Over excellent wine, he admits the book is, in a way, about his late mother. That loss opens a small window of connection; Mariana discloses her own mother’s death, and they share the undertow of grief.
The mood pivots as Fred confesses love and asks Mariana to marry him. His insistence on “looking after” her grates; she pushes back hard, rejecting the proposal and the fantasy that she needs saving. He counters with a conviction that she will agree “in time,” then kisses her—gentle enough to disarm her, unwelcome enough to alarm her.
He quotes Tennyson—“better to have loved and lost”—and a chill enters the room. His tone sharpens, the sweetness hardens, and Mariana senses volatility beneath the shy-mathematician surface.
Chapter 68
On the stairs, Fred’s kindness gives way to prickliness. He tries to press a letter on her—a summation of his feelings, a plea, a pressure tactic. She refuses, angry at the attempt to corner her, and leaves with a flicker of regret she refuses to indulge. A future with him is impossible; her love still belongs to Sebastian.
Drawn inside St. Christopher’s to Tennyson’s portrait, Mariana studies the poet’s faraway gaze. Realization lands: it’s not mere sadness but a man conversing with the dead—Arthur Hallam just beyond the veil. She wonders if she, too, lives half-turned toward a ghost.
Footsteps scrape the corridor. A figure emerges, bleeding and wild-eyed, a knife in hand: Henry Booth. He raves that Mariana has “sacrificed” him, the word striking a gong of dread. He threatens to kill himself before her—proof and punishment—when Morris the porter barrels in and tackles him. Police and doctors take Henry away to be sectioned. Mariana stands in the aftermath, the old guilt of abandoning her patients rising like a tide.
Chapter 69
It is past 1 a.m. when Mariana returns to her room. Sleep won’t come. She combs through every conversation, every clue, trying to outmaneuver a Fosca who always seems a step ahead. The answer feels close—a jigsaw puzzle she assembles blind—but the image keeps slipping out of reach.
At dawn she falls into a nightmare: a whiteout blizzard, Sebastian in a remote bar who looks through her as if she’s a stranger. He walks into the storm; Zoe wraps a blanket around Mariana’s shoulders. Mariana whispers the depth of her love; Zoe answers that love brings sorrow, and urges her to wake. The pounding that rattles the dream becomes real knocking at her door.
Chapter 70
Elsie, the cleaner, bustles in with an unsettling glint. It’s just after eleven. Another body is by the river. Cold panic flashes for Zoe—then the name: Serena. A third Maiden is dead.
Elsie remembers a final detail: a postcard pushed under Mariana’s door. The image is a black-and-white vase scene—Agamemnon’s daughter bound for slaughter: Iphigenia. Mariana turns it over with a shaking hand. A line in Ancient Greek cuts like a blade; the room seems to tilt, vertigo at the abyss opening beneath her.
τοιγάρ σέ ποτ᾽οὐρανίδαι
πέμψουσιν θανάτοις: ἦ σὰν
ἔτ᾽ ἔτι φόνιον ὑπὸ δέραν
ὄψομαι αἷμα χυθὲν σιδάρῳ(Therefore the gods will one day send you to your death: and I shall yet see your blood shed by the sword beneath your murderous throat.)
Character Development
Mariana steadies herself after twin shocks—Zoe’s secrecy and Henry’s attack—by choosing restraint over confrontation. Her refusal of Fred’s proposal is a clear assertion of agency even as she recognizes her own fixation on loss.
- Mariana: Guilt over Henry and awareness before Tennyson’s portrait nudge her toward self-scrutiny and away from living in the past.
- Fred: The tragic origin of his devotion, the suddenness of his proposal, and the cold turn afterward reveal a volatile core beneath his charm—both intimate and unnerving.
- Henry Booth: His collapse into violence exposes how obsession metastasizes; his language of “sacrifice” threads his personal delusion into the novel’s ritual frame.
Themes & Symbols
Grief and the pull of the past define these chapters. In the Tennyson portrait, Mariana recognizes a man in dialogue with the dead, and recognizes herself in him. The book’s emotional current runs through Grief and Loss, pushing characters to seek impossible returns—another universe, another chance, the beloved restored—and warping judgment in the process.
Desire tips into Obsession and Fixation: Fred’s courtship eclipses boundaries, Henry’s therapist-attachment curdles into menace, and Mariana’s devotion to Sebastian risks becoming self-erasure. These fixations dovetail with Childhood Trauma and Its Consequences, especially in Fred’s intellectual escape into parallel worlds—a coping mechanism that mutates into destiny-thinking about love.
Greek tragedy moves from subtext to script. The Iphigenia postcard reframes the murders as ritual offerings, yoking the Maidens to a sacrificial myth and hinting at a manipulator who believes myth grants moral authority. The theme of Deception and Betrayal surfaces in filial treachery (Agamemnon/Iphigenia), institutional trust (students/mentor), and personal secrets (Zoe’s membership), aligning suspicion with charismatic authority figures.
Key Quotes
“I’m not a damsel in distress, a … maiden waiting to be rescued.”
Mariana names and rejects the rescuing fantasy Fred projects onto her, flipping the novel’s title into a critique of passive femininity. It crystallizes her refusal to be cast in someone else’s narrative—romantic, heroic, or sacrificial.
“’It’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’”
Fred borrows Tennyson to sanctify his risk-taking, but the quotation functions as a mask. It aligns him with the book’s poetic motifs while underscoring the gulf between aestheticized grief and the ethical boundaries he crosses.
τοιγάρ σέ ποτ᾽οὐρανίδαι … ὄψομαι αἷμα χυθὲν σιδάρῳ
(Therefore the gods will one day send you to your death: and I shall yet see your blood shed by the sword beneath your murderous throat.)
The curse voice fuses myth and threat, assigning Mariana a role inside a prewritten tragedy. It confirms the killer’s dramaturgical intent: deaths are not random but cast and staged, with Mariana now drawn into the performance.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
The third murder fixes the pattern: a serial ritual framed by classical myth. Henry’s knife brings the violence into Mariana’s immediate world, collapsing the safe distance of investigation. Fred’s deepened portrait—tender yet controlling—sharpens him as a compelling red herring or a genuine danger, and underscores how grief breeds certainty that can justify transgression. The Iphigenia postcard removes ambiguity about motive and method, propelling the story into its endgame: Mariana must decode a killer who treats Cambridge as a theater and myth as permission.