Deborah Harkness - Shadow of Night

“Would they have thought to leave clothes for us, too?” I gestured down at my embroidered jacket and full skirts. They were still dusty from the unpaved, sixteenth-century Oxford road.

“Let’s find out.” Matthew carried the key and the page from Ashmole 782 into the family room and kitchen.

“Still brown,” I commented, looking at the checked wallpaper and ancient refrigerator.

“Still home,” Matthew said, drawing me into the crook of his arm.

“Not without Em and Sarah.” In contrast with the overstuffed household that had surrounded us for so many months, our modern family seemed fragile and its membership small. Here there was no Mary Sidney to discuss my troubles with in the course of a stormy evening. Neither Susanna nor Goody Alsop would drop by the house in the afternoon for a cup of wine and to help me perfect my latest spell. I wouldn’t have Annie’s cheerful assistance to get me out of my corset and skirts. Mop wasn’t underfoot, or Jack. And if we needed help, there was no Henry Percy to rush to our aid without question or hesitation. I slid my hand around Matthew’s waist, needing a reminder of his solid indestructibility.

“You will always miss them,” he said softly, gauging my mood, “but the pain will fade in time.”

“I’m beginning to feel more like a vampire than a witch,” I said ruefully. “Too many good-byes, too many missing loved ones.” I spotted the calendar on the wall. It showed the month of November. I pointed it out to Matthew.

“Is it possible that no one has been here since last year?” he wondered, worried.

“Something must be wrong,” I said, reaching for the phone.

“No,” said Matthew. “The Congregation could be tracing the calls or watching the house. We’re expected at Sept-Tours. Whether our time away can be measured in an hour or a year, that’s where we need to go.”

We found our modern clothes on top of the dryer, slipped into a pillowcase to keep them from getting dusty. Matthew’s briefcase sat neatly beside them. Em at least had been here since we left. No one else would have thought of such practicalities. I wrapped our Elizabethan clothes in the linens, reluctant to let go of these tangible remnants of our former lives, and tucked them under my arms like two lumpy footballs. Matthew slid the page from Ashmole 782 into his leather bag, closing it securely.

Matthew scanned the orchard and the fields before we left the house, his keen eyes alert to possible danger. I made my own sweep of the place with my witch’s third eye, but no one seemed to be out there. I could see the water under the orchard, hear the owls in the trees, taste the summer sweetness in the air, but that was all.

“Come on,” Matthew said, grabbing one of the bundles and taking my hand. We ran across the open space to the hop barn. Matthew put all his weight against the sliding door and pushed, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Sarah put a spell on it.” I could see it, twisted around the handle and through the grain of the wood. “A good one, too.”

“Too good to break?” Matthew’s mouth was tight with worry. It wasn’t surprising that he was concerned. Last time we were here, I hadn’t been able to light the Halloween pumpkins. I located the loose ends of the bindings and grinned.

“No knots. Sarah’s good, but she’s not a weaver.” I’d tucked my Elizabethan silks into the waistband of my leggings. When I pulled them free, the green and brown cords in my hand reached out and latched onto Sarah’s spell, loosening the restrictions my aunt had placed on the door faster than even our master thief Jack could have managed it.

Sarah’s Honda was parked inside the barn.

“How the hell are we going to fit you into that?” I wondered.

“I’ll manage,” Matthew said, tossing our clothes into the back. He handed me the briefcase, folded himself into the front seat, and after a few false starts the car sputtered to life.

“Where next?” I asked, fastening my seat belt.

“Syracuse. Then Montreal. Then Amsterdam, where I have a house.” Matthew put the car into drive and quietly rolled it into the field. “If anyone is watching for us, they’ll be looking in New York, London, and Paris.”

“We don’t have passports,” I observed.

“Look under the mat. Marcus would have told Sarah to leave them there,” He said. I peeled up the filthy mats and found Matthew’s French passport and my American one.

“Why isn’t your passport burgundy?” I asked, taking them out of the sealed plastic bag (another Em touch, I thought).

“Because it’s a diplomatic passport.” He steered out onto the road and switched on the headlights. “There should be one for you.”

My French diplomatic passport, inscribed with the name Diana de Clermont and noting my marital status relative to Matthew, was folded inside the ordinary U.S. version. How Marcus had managed to duplicate my passport photograph without damaging the original was anyone’s guess.

“Are you a spy now, too?” I asked faintly.

“No. It’s like the helicopters,” he replied with a smile, “just another perk associated with being a de Clermont.”

I left Syracuse as Diana Bishop and entered Europe the next day as Diana de Clermont. Matthew’s house in Amsterdam turned out to be a seventeenth-century mansion on the most beautiful stretch of the Herengracht. He had, Matthew explained, bought it right after he left Scotland in 1605.

We lingered there only long enough to shower and change clothes. I kept on the same leggings that I’d worn since Madison, and swapped out my shirt for one of Matthew’s. He donned his habitual gray and black cashmere and wool. It was odd not to see his legs. I’d grown accustomed to their being on display.

“It seems a fair trade,” Matthew commented. “I haven’t seen your legs for months, except in the privacy of our bedchamber.”

Matthew nearly had a heart attack when he discovered that his beloved Range Rover was not waiting for him in the underground garage. Instead we found a blue sports car with a soft top.

“I’m going to kill him,” Matthew said when he saw the low-slung vehicle. He used his house key to unlock a metal box bolted to the wall. Inside were another key and a note: “Welcome home. No one will expect you to be driving this. It’s safe. And fast. Hi, Diana. M .”

“What is it?” I said, looking at the airplane-style dials set into a flashy chrome dashboard.

“A Spyker Spyder. Marcus collects cars named after arachnids.” Matthew activated the car doors, and they scissored up like the wings on a jet fighter. He swore. “It’s the most conspicuous car imaginable.”

We only made it as far as Belgium before Matthew pulled in to a car dealership, handed over the keys to Marcus’s car, and pulled off the lot in something bigger and far less fun to drive. Safe in its heavy, boxy confines, we entered into France and some hours later began our slow ascent through the mountains of the Auvergne to Sept-Tours.

Glimpses of the fortress flickered between the trees—the pinkish gray stone, a dark tower window. I couldn’t help drawing comparisons between the castle and its adjacent town now and how it had looked when last I saw it in 1590. This time no smoke hung over Saint-Lucien in a gray pall. A sound of distant bells made me turn my head, thinking to spot the descendants of the goats I had known coming home for their evening meal. Pierre wouldn’t rush out with torches to meet us, though. Chef wasn’t in the kitchen decapitating pheasants with a cleaver as the freshly killed game was efficiently prepared to feed both warmbloods and vampires.

And there would be no Philippe, and therefore no shouts of laughter, shrewd observations on human frailty lifted from Euripides, or acute insights into the problems that would face us now that we had returned to the present. How long would it take to stop bracing myself for the rush of motion and bellow of sound that heralded Philippe’s arrival in a room? My heart hurt at the thought of my father-in-law. This harshly lit, fast-paced modern world had no place for heroes such as he.