A Discovery of Witches (25 page)

He remained silent. The hair on the back of my neck started to prickle.

“Your pilgrim’s badge tells me you were once in the Holy Land. Did you go on crusade? See Halley’s comet pass over Normandy in 1066?”

Still nothing.

“Watch Charlemagne’s coronation? Survive the fall of Carthage? Help keep Attila from reaching Rome?”

Matthew held up his right index finger. “Which fall of Carthage?”

“You tell me!”

“Damn you, Hamish Osborne,” he muttered, his hand flexing on the tablecloth. For the second time in two days, Matthew struggled over what to say. He stared into the candle, drawing his finger slowly through the flame. His flesh erupted into angry red blisters, then smoothed itself out into white, cold perfection an instant later without a flicker of pain evident on his face.

“I believe that my body is nearly thirty-seven years of age. I was born around the time Clovis converted to Christianity. My parents remembered that, or I’d have no idea. We didn’t keep track of birthdays back then. It’s tidier to pick the date of five hundred and be done with it.” He looked up at me, briefly, and returned his attention to the candles. “I was reborn a vampire in 537, and with the exception of Attila—who was before my time—you’ve touched on most of the high and low points in the millennium between then and the year I put the keystone into my house in Woodstock. Because you’re a historian, I feel obligated to tell you that Machiavelli was not nearly as impressive as you all seem to think he was. He was just a Florentine politician—and not a terribly good one at that.” A note of weariness had crept into his voice.

Matthew Clairmont was more than fifteen hundred years old.

“I shouldn’t pry,” I said by way of apology, unsure of where to look and mystified as to what had led me to think that knowing the historical events this vampire had lived through would help me know him better. A line from Ben Jonson floated into my mind. It seemed to explain Matthew in a way that the coronation of Charlemagne could not.
“‘He was not of an age, but for all time,’”
I murmured.

“‘With thee conversing I forget all time,’”
he responded, traveling further into seventeenth-century literature and offering up a line from Milton.

We looked at each other for as long as we could stand it, working another fragile spell between us. I broke it.

“What were you doing in the fall of 1859?”

His face darkened. “What has Peter Knox been telling you?”

“That you were unlikely to share your secrets with a witch.” My voice sounded calmer than I felt.

“Did he?” Matthew said softly, sounding less angry than he clearly was. I could see it in the set of his jaw and shoulders. “In September 1859 I was looking through the manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum.”

“Why, Matthew?”
Please tell me,
I urged silently, crossing my fingers in my lap. I’d provoked him into revealing the first part of his secret but wanted him to freely give me the rest.
No games, no riddles. Just tell me.

“I’d recently finished reading a book manuscript that was soon going to press. It was written by a Cambridge naturalist.” Matthew put down his glass.

My hand flew to my mouth as the significance of the date registered. “
Origin.
” Like Newton’s great work of physics, the
Principia,
this was a book that did not require a full citation. Anyone who’d passed high-school biology knew Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species.

“Darwin’s article the previous summer laid out his theory of natural selection, but the book was quite different. It was marvelous, the way he established easily observable changes in nature and inched you toward accepting something so revolutionary.”

“But alchemy has nothing to do with evolution.” Grabbing the bottle, I poured myself more of the precious wine, less concerned that it might vanish than that I might come unglued.

“Lamarck believed that each species descended from different ancestors and progressed independently toward higher forms of being. It’s remarkably similar to what your alchemists believed—that the philosopher’s stone was the elusive end product of a natural transmutation of base metals into more exalted metals like copper, silver, and gold.” Matthew reached for the wine, and I pushed it toward him.

“But Darwin disagreed with Lamarck, even if he did use the same word—‘transmutation’—in his initial discussions of evolution.”

“He disagreed with linear transmutation, it’s true. But Darwin’s theory of natural selection can still be seen as a series of linked transmutations.”

Maybe Matthew was right and magic really was in everything. It was in Newton’s theory of gravity, and it might be in Darwin’s theory of evolution, too.

“There are alchemical manuscripts all over the world.” I was trying to remain moored to the details while coming to terms with the bigger picture. “Why the Ashmole manuscripts?”

“When I read Darwin and saw how he seemed to explore the alchemical theory of transmutation through biology, I remembered stories about a mysterious book that explained the origin of our three species—daemons, witches, and vampires. I’d always dismissed them as fantastic.” He took a sip of wine. “Most suggested that the story was concealed from human eyes in a book of alchemy. The publication of
Origin
prompted me to look for it, and if such a book existed, Elias Ashmole would have bought it. He had an uncanny ability to find bizarre manuscripts.”

“You were looking for it here in Oxford, one hundred and fifty years ago?”

“Yes,” Matthew said. “And one hundred and fifty years before you received Ashmole 782, I was told that it was missing.”

My heart sped up, and he looked at me in concern. “Keep going,” I said, waving him on.

“I’ve been trying to get my hands on it ever since. Every other Ashmole manuscript was there, and none seemed promising. I’ve looked at manuscripts in other libraries—at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Germany, the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, the Medici Library in Florence, the Vatican, the Library of Congress.”

I blinked, thinking of a vampire wandering the hallways of the Vatican.

“The only manuscript I haven’t seen is Ashmole 782. By simple process of elimination, it must be the manuscript that contains our story—if it still survives.”

“You’ve looked at more alchemical manuscripts than I have.”

“Perhaps,” Matthew admitted, “but it doesn’t mean I understand them as well as you do. What all the manuscripts I’ve seen have in common, though, is an absolute confidence that the alchemist can help one substance change into another, creating new forms of life.”

“That sounds like evolution,” I said flatly.

“Yes,” Matthew said gently, “it does.”

We moved to the sofas, and I curled up into a ball at the end of one while Matthew sprawled in the corner of the other, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Happily, he’d brought the wine. Once we were settled, it was time for more honesty between us.

“I met a daemon, Agatha Wilson, at Blackwell’s last week. According to the Internet, she’s a famous designer. Agatha told me the daemons believe that Ashmole 782 is the story of all origins—even human origins. Peter Knox told me a different story. He said it was the first grimoire, the source of all witches’ power. Knox believes that the manuscript contains the secret of immortality,” I said, glancing at Matthew, “and how to destroy vampires. I’ve heard the daemon and witch versions of the story—now I want yours.”

“Vampires believe the lost manuscript explains our longevity and our strength,” he said. “In the past, our fear was that this secret—if it fell into witches’ hands—would lead to our extermination. Some fear that magic was involved in our making and that the witches might find a way to reverse the magic and destroy us. It seems that that part of the legend might be true.” He exhaled softly, looking worried.

“I still don’t understand why you’re so certain that this book of origins—whatever it may contain—is hidden inside an alchemy book.”

“An alchemy book could hide these secrets in plain sight—just like Peter Knox hides his identity as a witch under the veneer that he’s an expert in the occult. I think it was vampires who learned that the book was alchemical. It’s too perfect a fit to be coincidence. The human alchemists seemed to capture what it is to be a vampire when they wrote about the philosopher’s stone. Becoming a vampire makes us nearly immortal, it makes most of us rich, and it gives us the chance to accrue unimaginable knowledge and learning.”

“That’s the philosopher’s stone, all right.” The parallels between this mythic substance and the creature sitting opposite me were striking—and chilling. “But it’s still hard to imagine such a book really exists. For one thing, all the stories contradict one another. And who would be so foolish as to put so much information in one place?”

“As with the legends about vampires and witches, there’s at least a nugget of truth in all the stories about the manuscript. We just have to figure out what that nugget is and strip away the rest. Then we’ll begin to understand.”

Matthew’s face bore no trace of deceit or evasion. Encouraged by his use of “we,” I decided he’d earned more information.

“You’re right about Ashmole 782. The book you’ve been seeking is inside it.”

“Go on,” Matthew said softly, trying to control his curiosity.

“It’s an alchemy book on the surface. The images contain errors, or deliberate mistakes—I still can’t decide which.” I bit my lip in concentration, and his eyes fixed on the place where my teeth had drawn a tiny bead of blood to the surface.

“What do you mean ‘it’s an alchemy book on the surface’?” Matthew held his glass closer to his nose.

“It’s a palimpsest. But the ink hasn’t been washed away. Magic is hiding the text. I almost missed the words, they’re hidden so well. But when I turned one of the pages, the light was at just the right angle and I could see lines of writing moving underneath.”

“Could you read it?”

“No.” I shook my head. “If Ashmole 782 contains information about who we are, how we came to be, and how we might be destroyed, it’s deeply buried.”

“It’s fine if it remains buried,” Matthew said grimly, “at least for now. But the time is quickly coming when we will need that book.”

“Why? What makes it so urgent?”

“I’d rather show you than tell you. Can you come to my lab tomorrow?”

I nodded, mystified.

“We can walk there after lunch,” he said, standing up and stretching. We had emptied the bottle of wine amid all this talk of secrets and origins. “It’s late. I should go.”

Matthew reached for the doorknob and gave it a twist. It rattled, and the catch sprang open easily.

He frowned. “Have you had trouble with your lock?”

“No,” I said, pushing the mechanism in and out, “not that I’m aware of.”

“You should have them look at that,” he said, still jiggling the door’s hardware. “It might not close properly until you do.”

When I looked up from the door, an emotion I couldn’t name flitted across his face.

“I’m sorry the evening ended on such a serious note,” he said softly. “I did have a lovely time.”

“Was the dinner really all right?” I asked. We’d talked about the secrets of the universe, but I was more worried about how his stomach was faring.

“It was more than all right,” he assured me.

My face softened at his beautiful, ancient features. How could people walk by him on the street and not gasp? Before I could stop myself, my toes were gripping the old rug and I was stretching up to kiss him quickly on the cheek. His skin felt smooth and cold like satin, and my lips felt unusually warm against his flesh.

Why did you do that?
I asked myself, coming down off my toes and gazing at the questionable doorknob to hide my confusion.

It was over in a matter of seconds, but as I knew from using magic to get
Notes and Queries
off the Bodleian’s shelf, a few seconds was all it took to change your life.

Matthew studied me. When I showed no sign of hysteria or an inclination to make a run for it, he leaned toward me and kissed me slowly once, twice in the French manner. His face skimmed over mine, and he drank in my scent of willow sap and honeysuckle. When he straightened, Matthew’s eyes looked smokier than usual.

“Good night, Diana,” he said with a smile.

Moments later, leaning against the closed door, I spied the blinking number one on my answering machine. Mercifully, the machine’s volume was turned down.

Aunt Sarah wanted to ask the same question I’d asked myself.

I just didn’t want to answer.

Chapter 13

M
atthew came to collect me after lunch—the only creature among the human readers in the Selden End. While he walked me under the ornately painted exposed beams, he kept up a steady patter of questions about my work and what I’d been reading.

Oxford had turned resolutely cold and gray, and I pulled my collar up around my neck, shivering in the damp air. Matthew seemed not to mind and wasn’t wearing a coat. The gloomy weather made him look a little less startling, but it wasn’t enough to make him blend in entirely. People turned and stared in the Bodleian’s central courtyard, then shook their heads.

“You’ve been noticed,” I told him.

“I forgot my coat. Besides, they’re looking at you, not me.” He gave me a dazzling smile. A woman’s jaw dropped, and she poked her friend, inclining her head in Matthew’s direction.

I laughed. “You are so wrong.”

We headed toward Keble College and the University Parks, making a right turn at Rhodes House before entering the labyrinth of modern buildings devoted to laboratory and computer space. Built in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History, the enormous redbrick Victorian cathedral to science, these were monuments of unimaginative, functional contemporary architecture.