Deborah Harkness - Shadow of Night

He finished his cigarette and reached back into his pocket for a small leather pouch. It contained twenty-four disks an inch across and a quarter of an inch thick. They were cut from a branch he’d pulled from an ash tree that grew near his ancestral home. Each one had a mark burned into the surface, an alphabet for a language that no one spoke anymore.

He had always possessed a healthy respect for magic, even before he met Diana Bishop. There were powers abroad on the earth and the seas that no creature understood, and Gallowglass knew well enough to look the other way when they approached. But he couldn’t resist the runes. They helped him to navigate the treacherous waters of his fate.

He sifted his fingers through the smooth wooden circles, letting them fall through his hand like water. He wanted to know which way the tide was running—with the de Clermonts or against them?

When his fingers stilled, he drew out the rune that would tell him where matters stood now. Nyd , the rune for absence and desire. Gallowglass dipped his hand into the bag again to better understand what he wanted the future to hold. Odal , the glyph for home, family, and inheritance. He drew out the final rune, the one that would show him how to fulfill his gnawing wish to belong.

Rad . It was a confusing rune, one that stood for both an arrival and a departure, a journey’s beginning and its ending, a first meeting as well as a long-awaited reunion. Gallowglass’s hand closed around the bit of wood. This time its meaning was clear.

“You travel safely, too, Auntie Diana. And bring that uncle of mine with you,” Gallowglass said to the sea and the sky before he climbed back onto his bike and headed into a future he could no longer imagine nor postpone.

“Where are my red hose?” Matthew clomped downstairs and scowled at the boxes scattered all over the ground floor. His mood had taken a decided turn for the worse halfway through our four-week journey when we parted ways with Pierre, the children, and our luggage in Hamburg. We’d lost ten additional days by virtue of traveling from England into a Catholic country that reckoned time by a different calendar. In Prague, it was now the eleventh of March and the children and Pierre had yet to arrive.

“I’ll never find them in this mess!” Matthew said, taking out his frustration on one of my petticoats.

After we’d lived out of saddlebags and a single shared trunk for weeks, our belongings had arrived three days after we did at the tall, narrow house perched on the steep avenue leading to Prague Castle known as Sporrengasse. Our German neighbors presumably dubbed it Spur Street because that was the only way you could persuade a horse to make the climb.

“I didn’t know you owned red hose,” I said, straightening up.

“I do.” Matthew started rooting around in a box that contained my linen.

“Well, they won’t be in there,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

The vampire ground his teeth. “I’ve looked everywhere else.”

“I’ll find them.” I eyed his perfectly respectable black leggings. “Why red?”

“Because I am trying to catch the Holy Roman Emperor’s attention!” Matthew dove into another pile of my clothes.

Bloodred stockings would do more than capture a wandering eye, given that the man who proposed to wear them was a six-foot-three vampire, and most of his height was leg. Matthew’s commitment to the plan was unwavering, however. I focused my mind, asked for the hose to show themselves, and followed the red threads. The ability to keep track of people and objects was an unforeseen fringe benefit of being a weaver, and one I’d had several opportunities to use on the trip.

“Has my father’s messenger arrived?” Matthew contributed another petticoat to the snowy mountain growing between us and resumed digging.

“Yes. It’s over by the door—whatever it is.” I fished through contents of an overlooked chest: chain- mail gauntlets, a shield with a double-headed eagle on it, and an elaborately chased cup-and-stick gizmo. Triumphant, I brandished the long red tubes. “Found them!”

Matthew had forgotten the hosiery crisis. His father’s package now held his complete attention. I looked to see what had him so amazed.

“Is that . . . a Bosch?” I knew Hieronymus Bosch’s work because of his bizarre use of alchemical equipment and symbolism. He covered his panels with flying fish, insects, enormous household implements, and eroticized fruit. Long before psychedelic was stylish, Bosch saw the world in bright colors and unsettling combinations.

Like Matthew’s Holbeins at the Old Lodge, however, this work was unfamiliar. It was a triptych, assembled from three hinged wooden panels. Designed to sit on an altar, triptychs were kept closed except for special religious celebrations. In modern museums the exteriors were seldom on display. I wondered what other stunning images I’d been missing.

The artist had covered the outside panels with a velvety black pigment. A wizened tree shimmering in the moonlight spanned the two front panels. A tiny wolf crouched in its roots, and an owl perched in the upper branches. Both animals gazed at the viewer knowingly. A dozen other eyes shone out from the dark ground around the tree, disembodied and staring. Behind the dead oak, a stand of deceptively normal trees with pale trunks and iridescent green branches shed more light on the scene. Only when I took a closer look did I see the ears growing out of them, as though they were listening to the sounds of the night.

“What does it mean?” I asked, staring at Bosch’s work in wonder.

Matthew’s fingers fiddled with the fastenings on his doublet. “It’s an old Flemish proverb: ‘ The forest has eyes, and the woods have ears; therefore I will see, be silent, and hear .’” The words perfectly captured the secretive life Matthew led and reminded me of Elizabeth’s current choice of motto.

The triptych’s interior showed three interrelated scenes: an image of the fallen angels, painted against the same velvety black background. At first glance they looked more like dragonflies with their shimmering double wings, but they had human bodies, with heads and legs that twisted in torment as the angels fell through the heavens. On the opposite panel, the dead rose for the Last Judgment in a scene far more gruesome than the frescoes at Sept-Tours. The gaping jaws of fish and wolves provided entrances to hell, sucking in the damned and consigning them to an eternity of pain and agony.

The center, however, showed a very different image of death: the resurrected Lazarus calmly climbing out of his coffin. With his long legs, dark hair, and serious expression, he looked rather like Matthew. All around the borders of the center panel, lifeless vines produced strange fruits and flowers. Some dripped blood. Others gave birth to people and animals. And no Jesus was in sight.

“Lazarus resembles you. No wonder you don’t want Rudolf to have it.” I handed Matthew his hose. “Bosch must have known you were a vampire, too.”

“Jeroen—or Hieronymus as you know him—saw something he shouldn’t have,” Matthew said darkly. “I didn’t know that Jeroen had witnessed me feeding until I saw the sketches he made of me with a warmblood. From that day on, he believed all creatures had a dual nature, part human and part animal.”

“And sometimes part vegetable,” I said, studying a naked woman with a strawberry for a head and cherries for hands running away from a pitchfork-wielding devil wearing a stork as a hat. Matthew made a soft sound of amusement. “Does Rudolf know you’re a vampire, as Elizabeth does and Bosch did?” I was increasingly concerned by the number of people who were in on the secret.