A Discovery of Witches (73 page)

I turned to meet his eyes. “Was it the same message you gave to Baldwin at La Guardia?”

He nodded.

“I’m nothing but trouble to your family.”

“This isn’t a de Clermont family matter anymore, Diana. The Knights of Lazarus protect those who cannot protect themselves. Marcus knew that when he accepted a place among them.”

Matthew’s phone buzzed again.

“And that will be Marcus,” he said grimly.

“Go talk to him in private.” I tilted my chin toward the door. Matthew kissed my cheek before pushing the green button on his phone and heading into the backyard.

“Hello, Marcus,” he said warily, shutting the door behind him.

I continued moving the soapy water over the dishes, the repetitive motion soothing.

“Where’s Matthew?” Sarah and Em were standing in the doorway, holding hands.

“Outside, talking to England,” I said, nodding again in the direction of the back door.

Sarah got another clean mug out of the cabinet—the fourth she’d used that morning, by my count—and filled it with fresh coffee. Emily picked up the newspaper. Still, their eyes tingled with curiosity. The back door opened and closed. I braced for the worst.

“How is Marcus?”

“He and Miriam are on their way to New York. They have something to discuss with you.” Matthew’s face looked like a thundercloud.

“Me? What is it?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Marcus didn’t want you to be on your own with only witches to keep you company.” I smiled at him, and some of the tension left his face.

“They’ll be here by nightfall and will check in to the inn we passed on our way through town. I’ll go by and see them tonight. Whatever they need to tell you can wait until tomorrow.” Matthew’s worried eyes darted to Sarah and Em.

I turned to the sink again. “Call him back, Matthew. They should come straight here.”

“They won’t want to disturb anyone,” he said smoothly. Matthew didn’t want to upset Sarah and the rest of the Bishops by bringing two more vampires into the house. But my mother would never have let Marcus travel so far only to stay in a hotel.

Marcus was Matthew’s son. He was my son.

My fingers prickled, and the cup I was washing slipped from my grasp. It bobbed in the water for a few moments, then sank.

“No son of mine is checking in to a hotel. He belongs in the Bishop house, with his family, and Miriam shouldn’t be alone. They’re both staying here, and that’s final,” I said firmly.

“Son?” said Sarah faintly.

“Marcus is Matthew’s son, which makes him my son, too. That makes him a Bishop, and this house belongs to him as much as it does to you, or me, or Em.” I turned to face them, grabbing the sleeves of my shirt tightly with my wet hands, which were shaking.

My grandmother drifted down the hallway to see what the fuss was about.

“Did you hear me, Grandma?” I called.

I believe we all heard you, Diana
, she said in her rustly voice.

“Good. No acting up. And that goes for every Bishop in this house—living and dead.”

The house opened its front and back doors in a premature gesture of welcome, sending a gust of chilly air through the downstairs rooms.

“Where will they sleep?” Sarah grumbled.

“They don’t sleep, Sarah. They’re vampires.” The prickling in my fingers increased.

“Diana,” Matthew said, “please step away from the sink. The electricity,
mon coeur.
”

I gripped my sleeves tighter. The edges of my fingers were bright blue.

“We get the message,” Sarah said hastily, eyeing my hands. “We’ve already got one vampire in the house.”

“I’ll get their rooms ready,” Emily said, with a smile that looked genuine. “I’m glad we’ll have a chance to meet your son, Matthew.”

Matthew, who had been leaning against an ancient wooden cupboard, pulled himself upright and walked slowly toward me. “All right,” he said, drawing me from the sink and tucking my head under his chin. “You’ve made your point. I’ll call Marcus and let him know they’re welcome here.”

“Don’t tell Marcus I called him my son. He may not want a stepmother.”

“You two will have to sort that out,” Matthew said, trying to suppress his amusement.

“What’s so funny?” I tipped my face up to look at him.

“With all that’s happened this morning, the one thing you’re worried about is whether Marcus wants a stepmother. You confound me.” Matthew shook his head. “Are all witches this surprising, Sarah, or is it just Bishops?”

Sarah considered her answer. “Just Bishops.”

I peeked around Matthew’s shoulder to give her a grateful smile.

My aunts were surrounded by a mob of ghosts, all of whom were solemnly nodding in agreement.

Chapter 35

A
fter the dishes were done, Matthew and I gathered up my mother’s letter, the mysterious note, and the page from Ashmole 782 and carried them into the dining room. We spread the papers out on the room’s vast, well-worn table. These days it was seldom used, since it made no sense for two people to sit at the end of a piece of furniture designed to easily seat twelve. My aunts joined us, steaming mugs of coffee in their hands.

Sarah and Matthew crouched over the page from the alchemical manuscript.

“Why is it so heavy?” Sarah picked the page up and weighed it carefully.

“I don’t feel any special weightiness,” Matthew confessed, taking it from her hands, “but there’s something odd about the way it smells.”

Sarah gave it a long sniff. “No, it just smells old.”

“It’s more than that. I know what old smells like,” he said sardonically.

Em and I, on the other hand, were more interested in the enigmatic note.

“What do you think it means?” I asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

“I’m not sure.” Em hesitated. “Blood usually signifies family, war, or death. But what about absence? Does it mean this page is absent from the book? Or did it warn your parents that they wouldn’t be present as you grew up?”

“Look at the last line. Did my parents discover something in Africa?”

“Or were
you
the discovery of witches?” Em suggested gently.

“The last line must be about Diana’s discovery of Ashmole 782,” Matthew chimed in, looking up from the chemical wedding.

“You believe that everything is about me and that manuscript,” I grumbled. “The note mentions the subject of your All Souls essay—fear and desire. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“No stranger than the fact that the white queen in this picture is wearing my crest.” Matthew brought the illustration over to me.

“She’s the embodiment of quicksilver—the principle of volatility in alchemy,” I said.

“Quicksilver?” Matthew looked amused. “A metallic perpetual-motion machine?”

“You could say that.” I smiled, too, thinking of the ball of energy I’d given him.

“What about the red king?”

“He’s stable and grounded.” I frowned. “But he’s also supposed to be the sun, and he’s not usually depicted wearing black and red. Usually he’s just red.”

“So maybe the king isn’t me and the queen isn’t you.” He touched the white queen’s face delicately with his fingertip.

“Perhaps,” I said slowly, remembering a passage from the Matthew’s
Aurora
manuscript.
“‘Attend to me, all people, and listen to me, all who inhabit the world: my beloved, who is red, has called to me. He sought, and found me. I am the flower of the field, a lily growing in the valley. I am the mother of true love, and of fear, and of understanding, and blessed hope.’”

“What is that?” Matthew touched my face now. “It sounds biblical, but the words aren’t quite right.”

“It’s one of the passages on the chemical wedding from the
Aurora Consurgens
.” Our eyes locked, held. When the air became heavy, I changed the subject. “What did my father mean when he said we’d have to travel far to figure out the picture’s significance?”

“The stamp came from Israel. Maybe Stephen meant we would have to return there.”

“There are a lot of alchemical manuscripts in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University. Most of them belonged to Isaac Newton.” Given Matthew’s history with the place, not to mention the Knights of Lazarus, it was not a city I was eager to visit.

“Israel didn’t count as ‘traveling far’ for your father,” said Sarah, sitting opposite. Em walked around the table and joined her.

“What
did
qualify?” Matthew picked up my mother’s letter and scanned the last page for further clues.

“The Australian outback. Wyoming. Mali. Those were his favorite places to timewalk.”

The word cut through me with the same intensity as “spellbound” had only a few days before. I knew that some witches could move between past, present, and future, but I’d never thought to ask whether anyone in my own family had the ability. It was rare—almost as rare as witchfire.

“Stephen Proctor could travel in time?” Matthew’s voice assumed the deliberate evenness it often did when magic was mentioned.

Sarah nodded. “Yes. Stephen went to the past or the future at least once a year, usually after the annual anthropologists’ convention in December.”

“There’s something on the back of Rebecca’s letter.” Em bent her neck to see underneath the page.

Matthew quickly flipped it over. “I dropped the page to get you outside before the witchwater broke. I didn’t see this. It’s not your mother’s handwriting,” he said, passing it to me.

The handwriting on the penciled note had elongated loops and spiky peaks.
“Remember, Diana: ‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.’”
I’ d seen that hand somewhere before. In the recesses of my memory, I flipped through images trying to locate its source but without success.

“Who would have written a quote from Albert Einstein on the back of Mom’s note?” I asked Sarah and Em, angling the page to face them and struck again by its familiarity.

“That looks like your dad. He took calligraphy lessons. Rebecca poked fun at him for it. It made his handwriting look so old-fashioned.”

Slowly I turned the page over, scrutinizing the writing again. It did look nineteenth-century in style, like the handwriting of the clerks employed to compile the catalogs in the Bodleian back during Victoria’s reign. I stiffened, looked more closely at the writing, shook my head.

“No, it’s not possible.” There was no way my father could have been one of those clerks, no way he could have written the nineteenth-century subtitle on Ashmole 782.

But my father could timewalk. And the message from Einstein was unquestionably meant for me. I dropped the page onto the table and put my head in my hands.

Matthew sat next to me and waited. When Sarah made an impatient sound, he silenced her with a decisive gesture. Once my mind stopped spinning, I spoke.

“There were two inscriptions on the first page of the manuscript. One was in ink, written by Elias Ashmole: ‘
Anthropologia, or a treatis containing a short description of Man.’
The other was in a different hand, in pencil: ‘
in two parts: the first Anatomical, the second Psychological.’”

“The second inscription had to be written much later,” Matthew observed. “There was no such thing as ‘psychology’ during Ashmole’s lifetime.”

“I thought it dated from the nineteenth century.” I pulled my father’s note toward me. “But this makes me think my father wrote it.”

The room fell silent.

“Touch the words,” Sarah finally suggested. “See what else they say.”

My fingers passed lightly over the penciled letters. Images bloomed from the page, of my father in a dark frock coat with wide lapels and a high black cravat, crouched over a desk covered with books. There were other images, too, of him in his study at home wearing his familiar corduroy jacket, scrawling a note with a No. 2 pencil while my mother looked over his shoulder, weeping.

“It was him.” My fingers lifted from the page, shaking visibly.

Matthew took my hand in his. “That’s enough bravery for one day,
ma lionne
.”

“But your father didn’t remove the chemical wedding from the book at the Bodleian,” mused Em, “so what was he doing there?”

“Stephen Proctor was bewitching Ashmole 782 so that no one but his daughter could call it from the stacks.” Matthew sounded sure.

“So that’s why the spell recognized me. But why didn’t it behave the same way when I recalled it?”

“You didn’t need it. Oh, you
wanted
it,” Matthew said with a wry smile when I opened my mouth to protest, “but that’s different. Remember, your parents bound your magic so that your power couldn’t be forced from you. The spell on the manuscript was no different.”

“When I first called Ashmole 782, all I needed was to check the next item off my to-do list. It’s hard to believe that something so insignificant could trigger such a reaction.”

“Your mother and father couldn’t have foreseen everything—such as the fact that you would be a historian of alchemy and would regularly work at the Bodleian. Could Rebecca timewalk, too?” Matthew asked Sarah.

“No. It’s rare, of course, and the most adept timewalkers are well versed in witchcraft as well. Without the right spells and precautions, you can easily end up somewhere you don’t want to be, no matter how much power you have.”

“Yes,” Matthew said drily. “I can think of any number of times and places you would want to avoid.”

“Rebecca went with Stephen sometimes, but he had to carry her.” Sarah smiled at Em. “Do you remember Vienna? Stephen decided he was going to take her waltzing. He spent a full year figuring out which bonnet she should wear for the journey.”