A Discovery of Witches (20 page)

This was
not
good. Like all members of the university, I’d sworn an oath not to bring fire or flame into Bodley’s Library. The last time my fingers had behaved like this, I was thirteen and the fire department had to be called to extinguish the blaze in the kitchen.

When the burning sensation abated, I looked around carefully and sighed with relief. I was alone in the Selden End. No one had witnessed my fireworks display. Pulling my hands from underneath my thighs, I scrutinized them for further signs of supernatural activity. The blue was already diminishing to a silvery gray as the power retreated from my fingertips.

I opened the first box only after ascertaining I wouldn’t set fire to it and pretended that nothing unusual had happened. Still, I hesitated to touch my computer for fear that my fingers would fuse to the plastic keys.

Not surprisingly, it was difficult to concentrate, and that same manuscript was still before me at lunchtime. Maybe some tea would calm me down.

At the beginning of term, one would expect to see a handful of human readers in Duke Humfrey’s medieval wing. Today there was only one: an elderly human woman examining an illuminated manuscript with a magnifying glass. She was squashed between an unfamiliar daemon and one of the female vampires from last week. Gillian Chamberlain was there, too, glowering at me along with four other witches as if I’d let down our entire species.

Hurrying past, I stopped at Miriam’s desk. “I presume you have instructions to follow me to lunch. Are you coming?”

She put down her pencil with exaggerated care. “After you.”

Miriam was in front of me by the time I reached the back staircase. She pointed to the steps on the other side. “Go down that way.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged.

One flight down I glanced through the small window stuck into the swinging door that led to the Upper Reading Room, and I gasped.

The room was full to bursting with creatures. They had segregated themselves. One long table held nothing but daemons, conspicuous because not a single book—open or closed—sat in front of them. Vampires sat at another table, their bodies perfectly still and their eyes never blinking. The witches appeared studious, but their frowns were signs of irritation rather than concentration, since the daemons and vampires had staked out the tables closest to the staircase.

“No wonder we’re not supposed to mix. No human could ignore this,” Miriam observed.

“What have I done now?” I asked in a whisper.

“Nothing. Matthew’s not here,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Why are they so afraid of Matthew?”

“You’ll have to ask him. Vampires don’t tell tales. But don’t worry,” she continued, baring her sharp, white teeth, “these work perfectly, so you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Shoving my hands into my pockets, I clattered down the stairs, pushing through the tourists in the quadrangle. At Blackwell’s, I swallowed a sandwich and a bottle of water. Miriam caught my eye as I passed by her on the way to the exit. She put aside a murder mystery and followed me.

“Diana,” she said quietly as we passed through the library’s gates, “what are you up to?”

“None of your business,” I snapped.

Miriam sighed.

Back in Duke Humfrey’s, I located the wizard in brown tweed. Miriam watched intently from the center aisle, still as a statue.

“Are you in charge?”

He tipped his head to the side in acknowledgment.

“I’m Diana Bishop,” I said, sticking out my hand.

“Peter Knox. And I know very well who you are. You’re Rebecca and Stephen’s child.” He touched my fingertips lightly with his own. There was a nineteenth-century grimoire sitting in front of him, a stack of reference books at his side.

The name was familiar, though I couldn’t place it, and hearing my parents’ names come out of this wizard’s mouth was disquieting. I swallowed, hard. “Please clear your . . . friends out of the library. The new students arrive today, and we wouldn’t want to frighten them.”

“If we could have a quiet word, Dr. Bishop, I’m sure we could come to some arrangement.” He pushed his glasses up over the bridge of his nose. The closer I was to Knox, the more danger I felt. The skin under my fingernails started to prickle ominously.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” he said sorrowfully. “That vampire, on the other hand—”

“You think I found something that belongs to the witches,” I interrupted. “I no longer have it. If you want Ashmole 782, there are request slips on the desk in front of you.”

“You don’t understand the complexity of the situation.”

“No, and I don’t
want
to know. Please, leave me alone.”

“Physically you are very like your mother.” Knox’s eyes swept over my face. “But you have some of Stephen’s stubbornness as well, I see.”

I felt the usual combination of envy and irritation that accompanied a witch’s references to my parents or family history—as if they had an equal claim to mine.

“I’ll try,” he continued, “but I don’t control those animals.” He waved across the aisle, where one of the Scary Sisters was watching Knox and me with interest. I hesitated, then crossed over to her seat.

“I’m sure you heard our conversation, and you must know I’m under the direct supervision of two vampires already,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay, if you don’t trust Matthew and Miriam. But clear the others out of the Upper Reading Room.”

“Witches are hardly ever worth a moment of a vampire’s time, but you are full of surprises today, Diana Bishop. Wait until I tell my sister Clarissa what she’s missed.” The female vampire’s words came out in a lush, unhurried drawl redolent of impeccable breeding and a fine education. She smiled, teeth gleaming in the low light of the medieval wing. “Challenging Knox—a child like you? What a tale I’ll have to tell.”

I dragged my eyes away from her flawless features and went off in search of a familiar daemonic face.

The latte-loving daemon was drifting around the computer terminals wearing headphones and humming under his breath to some unheard music as the end of the cord was swinging freely around the tops of his thighs. Once he pulled the white plastic disks from his ears, I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation.

“Listen, you’re welcome to keep surfing the Net up here. But we’ve got a problem downstairs. It’s not necessary for two dozen daemons to be watching me.”

The daemon made an indulgent sound. “You’ll know soon enough.”

“Could they watch me from farther away? The Sheldonian? The White Horse?” I was trying to be helpful. “If not, the human readers will start asking questions.”

“We’re not like you,” he said dreamily.

“Does that mean you can’t help or you won’t?” I tried not to sound impatient.

“It’s all the same thing. We need to know, too.”

This was impossible. “Whatever you can do to take some of the pressure off the seats would be greatly appreciated.”

Miriam was still watching me. Ignoring her, I returned to my desk.

At the end of the completely unproductive day, I pinched the bridge of my nose, swore under my breath, and packed up my things.

 

The next morning the Bodleian was far less crowded. Miriam was scribbling furiously and didn’t look up when I passed. There was still no sign of Clairmont. Even so, everybody was observing the rules that he had clearly, if silently, laid down, and they stayed out of the Selden End. Gillian was in the medieval wing, crouched over her papyri, as were both Scary Sisters and a few daemons. With the exception of Gillian, who was doing real work, the rest went through the motions with perfect respectability. And when I stuck my head around the swinging door into the Upper Reading Room after a hot cup of tea at midmorning, only a few creatures looked up. The musical, coffee-loving daemon was among them. He tipped his fingers and winked at me knowingly.

I got a reasonable amount of work done, although not enough to make up for yesterday. I began by reading alchemical poems—the trickiest of texts—that were attributed to Mary, the sister of Moses. “
Three things if you three hours attend,”
read one part of the poem, “
Are chained together in the End.”
The meaning of the verses remained a mystery, although the most likely subject was the chemical combination of silver, gold, and mercury. Could Chris produce an experiment from this poem? I wondered, noting the possible chemical processes involved.

When I turned to another, anonymous poem, entitled “Verse on the Threefold Sophic Fire,” the similarities between its imagery and an illumination I’d seen yesterday of an alchemical mountain, riddled with mines and miners digging in the ground for precious metals and stones, were unmistakable.

I stifled a groan. My research would become exponentially more complicated if I had to connect not only art and science but art and poetry.

“It must be hard to concentrate on your research with vampires watching you.”

Gillian Chamberlain was standing next to me, her hazel eyes sparking with suppressed malevolence.

“What do you want, Gillian?”

“I’m just being friendly, Diana. We’re sisters, remember?” Gillian’s shiny black hair swung above her collar. Its smoothness suggested that she was not troubled by surges of static electricity. Her power must be regularly released. I shivered.

“I have no sisters, Gillian. I’m an only child.”

“It’s a good thing, too. Your family has caused more than enough trouble. Look at what happened at Salem. It was all Bridget Bishop’s fault.” Gillian’s tone was vicious.

Here we go again,
I thought, closing the volume before me. As usual, the Bishops were proving to be an irresistible topic of conversation.

“What are you talking about, Gillian?” My voice was sharp. “Bridget Bishop was found guilty of witchcraft and executed. She didn’t instigate the witch-hunt—she was a victim of it, just like the others. You know that, as does every other witch in this library.”

“Bridget Bishop drew human attention, first with those poppets of hers and then with her provocative clothes and immorality. The human hysteria would have passed if not for her.”

“She was found innocent of practicing witchcraft,” I retorted, bristling.

“In 1680—but no one believed it. Not after they found the poppets in her cellar wall, pins stuck through them and the heads ripped off. Afterward Bridget did nothing to protect her fellow witches from falling under suspicion. She was so independent.” Gillian’s voice dropped. “That was your mother’s fatal flaw, too.”

“Stop it, Gillian.” The air around us seemed unnaturally cold and clear.

“Your mother and father were standoffish, just like you, thinking they didn’t need the Cambridge coven’s support after they got married. They learned, didn’t they?”

I shut my eyes, but it was impossible to block out the image I’d spent most of my life trying to forget: my mother and father lying dead in the middle of a chalk-marked circle somewhere in Nigeria, their bodies broken and bloody. My aunt wouldn’t share the details of their death at the time, so I’d slipped into the public library to look them up. That’s where I’d first seen the picture and the lurid headline that accompanied it. The nightmares had gone on for years afterward.

“There was nothing the Cambridge coven could do to prevent my parents’ murder. They were killed on another continent by fearful humans.” I gripped the arms of my chair, hoping that she wouldn’t see my white knuckles.

Gillian gave an unpleasant laugh. “It wasn’t humans, Diana. If it had been, their killers would have been caught and dealt with.” She crouched down, her face close to mine. “Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor were keeping secrets from other witches. We needed to discover them. Their deaths were unfortunate, but necessary. Your father had more power than we ever dreamed.”

“Stop talking about
my
family and
my
parents as though they belong to you,” I warned. “They were killed by humans.” There was a roaring in my ears, and the coldness that surrounded us was intensifying.

“Are you sure?” Gillian whispered, sending a fresh chill into my bones. “As a witch, you’d know if I was lying to you.”

I governed my features, determined not to show my confusion. What Gillian said about my parents couldn’t be true, and yet there were none of the subtle alarms that typically accompanied untruths between witches—the spark of anger, an overwhelming feeling of contempt.

“Think about what happened to Bridget Bishop and your parents the next time you turn down an invitation to a coven gathering,” Gillian murmured, her lips so close to my ear that her breath swept against my skin. “A witch shouldn’t keep secrets from other witches. Bad things happen when she does.”

Gillian straightened and stared at me for a few seconds, the tingle of her glance growing uncomfortable the longer it lasted. Staring fixedly at the closed manuscript before me, I refused to meet her eyes.

After she left, the air’s temperature returned to normal. When my heart stopped pounding and the roaring in my ears abated, I packed my belongings with shaking hands, badly wanting to be back in my rooms. Adrenaline was coursing through my body, and I wasn’t sure how long it would be possible to fend off my panic.

I managed to get out of the library without incident, avoiding Miriam’s sharp glance. If Gillian was right, it was the jealousy of fellow witches that I needed to be wary of, not human fear. And the mention of my father’s hidden powers made something half remembered flit at the edges of my mind, but it eluded me when I tried to fix it in place long enough to see it clearly.