Deborah Harkness - A Discovery of Witches

“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.

Matthew 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.

Matthew pointed to our destination—a nondescript, low-slung building—and fished in his pocket for a plastic identity card. He swiped it through the reader at the door handle and punched in a set of codes in two different sequences. Once the door unlocked, he ushered me to the guard’s station, where he signed me in as a guest and handed me a pass to clip to my sweater.

“That’s a lot of security for a university laboratory,” I commented, fiddling with the badge.

The security only increased as we walked down the miles of corridors that somehow managed to fit behind the modest façade. At the end of one hallway, Matthew took a different card out of his pocket, swiped it, and put his index finger on a glass panel next to a door. The glass panel chimed, and a touch pad appeared on its surface. Matthew’s fingers raced over the numbered keys. The door clicked softly open, and there was a clean, slightly antiseptic smell reminiscent of hospitals and empty professional kitchens. It derived from unbroken expanses of tile, stainless steel, and electronic equipment.

A series of glass-enclosed rooms stretched ahead of us. One held a round table for meetings, a black monolith of a monitor, and several computers. Another held an old wooden desk, a leather chair, an enormous Persian rug that must have been worth a fortune, telephones, fax machines, and still more computers and monitors. Beyond were other enclosures that held banks of file cabinets, microscopes, refrigerators, autoclaves, racks upon racks of test tubes, centrifuges, and dozens of unrecognizable devices and instruments.

The whole area seemed unoccupied, although from somewhere there came faint strains of a Bach cello concerto and something that sounded an awful lot like the latest hit recorded by the Eurovision song-contest winners.