Deborah Harkness - A Discovery of Witches

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.