A Discovery of Witches: A Novel (All Souls Trilogy)

by Deborah Harkness

  I picked up the table that Matthew used to hold his afternoon wine and carried it over to the bookcases. He wouldn’t mind me looking through his library—or so I told myself, kicking off my loafers. The table’s burnished surface gave a warning creak when I swung my feet onto it and stood, but the wood held fast.

  The wooden toy at the far right of the top shelf was at eye level now. I sucked in a deep breath and pulled out the first item from the opposite end. It was ancient—the oldest manuscript I’d ever handled. The leather cover complained when it opened, and the smell of old sheepskin rose from the pages.

  “Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi, / Flebilis heu maestos cogor inire modos,” read the first lines. My eyes pricked with tears. It was Boethius’s sixth-century work, The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison while he was awaiting death. “To pleasant songs my work was once given, and bright were all my labors then; / But now in tears to sad refrains I must return.” I imagined Matthew, bereft of Blanca and Lucas and bewildered by his new identity as a vampire, reading words written by a condemned man. Giving silent thanks to whoever had offered him this in hope of lessening his grief, I slid the book back into place.

  The next volume was a beautifully illustrated manuscript of Genesis, the biblical story of creation. Its strong blues and reds looked as fresh as the day they had been painted. Another illustrated manuscript, this one a copy of Dioscorides’ book of plants, was also on the top shelf, along with more than a dozen other biblical books, several law books, and a book in Greek.

  The shelf below held more of the same—books of the Bible mostly, along with a medical book and a very early copy of a seventh-century encyclopedia. It represented Isidore of Seville’s attempt to capture all of human knowledge, and it would have appealed to Matthew’s endless curiosity. At the bottom of the first folio was the name “MATHIEU,” along with the phrase “meus liber”—“my book.”

  Feeling the same urge to trace the letters as when I faced Ashmole 782 in the Bodleian, my fingers faltered on their way to the surface of the vellum. Then I’d been too afraid of the reading-room supervisors and my own magic to risk it. Now it was fear of learning something unexpected about Matthew that held me back. But there was no supervisor here, and my fears became insignificant when weighed against my desire to understand the vampire’s past. I traced Matthew’s name. An image of him, sharp and clear, came to me without the use of stern commands or shining surfaces.

  He was seated at a plain table by a window, looking just as he did now, biting his lip with concentration as he practiced his writing. Matthew’s long fingers gripped a reed pen, and he was surrounded by sheets of vellum, all of which bore repeated blotchy attempts to write his own name and copy out biblical passages. Following Marthe’s advice, I didn’t fight the vision’s arrival or departure, and the experience was not as disorienting as it had been last night.

  Once my fingers had revealed all they could, I replaced the encyclopedia and continued working my way through the remaining volumes in the case. There were history books, more law books, books on medicine and optics, Greek philosophy, books of accounts, the collected works of early church notables like Bernard of Clairvaux, and chivalric romances—one involving a knight who changed into a wolf once a week. But none revealed fresh information about the Knights of Lazarus. I bit back a sound of frustration and climbed down from the table.

  My knowledge of Crusader orders was sketchy. Most of them started out as military units that were renowned for bravery and discipline. The Templars were famous for being the first to enter the field of battle and the last to leave. But the orders’ military efforts were not limited to the area around Jerusalem. The knights fought in Europe, too, and many answered only to the pope rather than to kings or other secular authorities.

  Nor was the power of the chivalric orders solely military. They’d built churches, schools, and leper hospitals. The military orders safeguarded Crusader interests, whether spiritual, financial, or physical. Vampires like Matthew were territorial and possessive to the last, and therefore ideally suited to the role of guardians.

  But the power of the military orders led ultimately to their downfall. Monarchs and popes were jealous of their wealth and influence. In 1312 the pope and the French king saw to it that the Templars were disbanded, ridding themselves of the threat posed by the largest, most prestigious brotherhood. Most of the other orders gradually petered out due to lack of support and interest.

  There were all those conspiracy theories, of course. A vast, complex international institution is hard to dismantle overnight, and the sudden dissolution of the Knights Templar had led to all sorts of fantastic tales about rogue Crusaders and underground operations. People still searched for traces of the Templars’ fabulous wealth. The fact that no one had ever found evidence of how it was disbursed only added to the intrigue.

  The money. It was one of the first lessons historians learned: follow the money. I refocused my search.

  The sturdy outlines of the first ledger were visible on the third shelf, tucked between Al-Hazen’s Optics and a romantic French chanson de geste. A small Greek letter was inked on the manuscript’s fore edge: α. Figuring it must be an indexing mark of some sort, I scanned the shelves and located the second account book. It, too, had a small Greek letter, β. My eyes lit on γ, δ, and ε, scattered among the shelves, too. A more careful search would locate the rest, I was sure.

  Feeling like Eliot Ness waving a fistful of tax receipts in pursuit of Al Capone, I held up my hand. There was no time to waste on climbing to retrieve it. The first account book slid from its resting place and fell into my waiting palm.

  Its entries were dated 1117 and were made by a number of different hands. Names and numbers danced across the pages. My fingers were busy, taking in all the information they could from the writing. A few faces bloomed out of the vellum repeatedly—Matthew, the dark man with the hawkish nose, a man with bright hair the color of burnished copper, another with warm brown eyes and a serious face.

  My hands stilled over an entry for money received in 1149. “Eleanor Regina, 40,000 marks.” It was a staggering sum—more than half the yearly income of the kingdom of England. Why was the queen of England giving so much to a military order led by vampires? But the Middle Ages were too far outside my expertise for me to be able to answer that question or to know much about the people engaging in the transfers. I shut the book with a snap and went to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bookcases.

  Nestled among the other books was a volume bearing the identifying mark of a Greek lambda. My eyes widened once it was open.

  Based on this ledger, the Knights of Lazarus had paid—somewhat unbelievably—for a wide range of wars, goods, services, and diplomatic feats, including providing Mary Tudor’s dowry when she married Philip of Spain, buying the cannon for the Battle of Lepanto, bribing the French so they’d attend the Council of Trent, and financing most of the military actions of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League. Apparently the brotherhood didn’t allow politics or religion to get in the way of their investment decisions. In a single year, they’d bankrolled Mary Stuart’s return to the Scottish throne and paid off Elizabeth I’s sizable debts to the Antwerp Bourse.

  I walked along the shelves looking for more books marked with Greek letters. On the nineteenth-century shelves, there was one with the forked letter psi on its faded blue buckram spine. Inside, vast sums of money were meticulously accounted for, along with property sales that made my head spin—how did one secretly purchase most of the factories in Manchester?—and familiar names belonging to royalty, aristocrats, presidents, and Civil War generals. There were also smaller payouts for school fees, clothing allowances, and books, along with entries concerning dowries paid, hospital bills settled, and past-due rents brought up to date. Next to all the unfamiliar names was the abbreviation “MLB” or “FMLB.”

  My Latin was not as good as it should be, but I was sure the abbreviations stood for the Knights of Lazaru
s of Bethany—militie Lazari a Bethania—or for filia militie or filius militie, the daughters and sons of the knights. And if the order was still disbursing funds in the middle of the nineteenth century, the same was probably true today. Somewhere in the world, a piece of paper—a real-estate transaction, a legal agreement—bore an impression of the order’s great seal in thick, black wax.

  And Matthew had applied it.

  Hours later I was back in the medieval section of Matthew’s library and opened my last account book. This volume spanned the period from the late thirteenth century to the first half of the fourteenth century. The staggering sums were now expected, but around 1310 the number of entries increased dramatically. So, too, did the flow of money. A new annotation accompanied some of the names: a tiny red cross. In 1313, next to one of these marks, was a name I recognized: Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar.

  He’d been burned at the stake for heresy in 1314. A year before he was executed, he’d turned over everything he owned to the Knights of Lazarus.

  There were hundreds of names marked with red crosses. Were they all Templars? If so, then the mystery of the Templars was solved. The knights and their money hadn’t disappeared. Both had simply been absorbed into the order of Lazarus.

  It couldn’t be true. Such a thing would have taken too much planning and coordination. And no one could have kept such a grand scheme secret. The idea was as implausible as stories about—

  Witches and vampires.

  The Knights of Lazarus were no more or less believable than I was.

  As for conspiracy theories, their chief weakness was that they were so complex. No lifetime was sufficient to gather the necessary information, build the links between all the required elements, and then set the plans in motion. Unless, of course, the conspirators were vampires. If you were a vampire—or, better yet, a family of vampires—then the passage of time would matter little. As I knew from Matthew’s scholarly career, vampires had all the time they needed.

  The enormity of what it meant to love a vampire struck home as I slid the account book back onto the shelf. It was not just his age that posed the difficulties, or his dining habits, or the fact that he had killed humans and would do so again. It was the secrets.

  Matthew had been accumulating secrets—large ones like the Knights of Lazarus and his son Lucas, small ones like his relationships with William Harvey and Charles Darwin—for well over a millennium. My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them.

  But it was not only vampires who kept secrets. All creatures learned to do so out of fear of discovery and to preserve something—anything—just for ourselves within our clannish, almost tribal, world. Matthew was not simply a hunter, a killer, a scientist, or a vampire, but a web of secrets, just as I was. For us to be together, we needed to decide which secrets to share and then let the others go.

  The computer chimed in the quiet room when my finger pressed the power button. Marthe’s sandwiches were dry and the tea was cold, but I nibbled so that she wouldn’t think her efforts had gone unappreciated.

  Finished, I sat back and stared into the fire. The Knights of Lazarus roused me as a historian, and my witch’s instincts told me the brotherhood was important to understanding Matthew. But their existence was not his most important secret. Matthew was guarding himself—his innermost nature.

  What a complicated, delicate business it was going to be to love him. We were the stuff of fairy tales—vampires, witches, knights in shining armor. But there was a troubling reality to face. I had been threatened, and creatures watched me in the Bodleian in hopes I’d recall a book that everyone wanted but no one understood. Matthew’s laboratory had been targeted. And our relationship was destabilizing the fragile détente that had long existed among daemons, humans, vampires, and witches. This was a new world, in which creatures were pitted against creatures and a silent, secret army could be called into action by a stamp in a pool of black wax. It was no wonder that Matthew might prefer to put me aside.

  I snuffed the candles and climbed the stairs to bed. Exhausted, I quickly drifted off, my dreams filled with knights, bronze seals, and endless books of accounts.

  A cold, slender hand touched my shoulder, waking me instantly.

  “Matthew?” I sat bolt upright.

  Ysabeau’s white face glimmered in the darkness. “It’s for you.” She handed me her red mobile and left the room.

  “Sarah?” I was terrified that something had happened to my aunts.

  “It’s all right, Diana.”

  Matthew.

  “What’s happened?” My voice shook. “Did you make a deal with Knox?”

  “No. I can’t make any progress there. There’s nothing left for me in Oxford. I want to be home, with you. I should be there in a few hours.” He sounded strange, his voice thick.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “You’re not dreaming,” Matthew said. “And, Diana?” He hesitated. “I love you.”

  It was what I most wanted to hear. The forgotten chain inside me started to sing, quietly, in the dark.

  “Come here and tell me that,” I said softly, my eyes filling with tears of relief.

  “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  “Never,” I said fiercely.

  “You’ll be in danger, and your family, too. Are you willing to risk that, for my sake?”

  “I made my choice.”

  We said good-bye and hung up reluctantly, afraid of the silence that would follow after so much had been said.

  While he was gone, I had stood at a crossroads, unable to see a way forward.

  My mother had been known for her uncanny visionary abilities. Would she have been powerful enough to see what awaited us as we took our first steps, together?

  Chapter 26

  I’d been waiting for the crunch of tires on gravel since pushing the disconnect button on Ysabeau’s tiny mobile phone—and since then it hadn’t been out of my sight.

  A fresh pot of tea and breakfast rolls were waiting for me when I emerged from the bathroom, phone in hand. I bolted the food, flung on the first clothes that my fingers touched, and flew down the stairs with wet hair. Matthew wouldn’t reach Sept-Tours for hours, but I was determined to be waiting when he pulled up.

  First I waited in the salon on a sofa by the fire, wondering what had happened in Oxford to make Matthew change his mind. Marthe brought me a towel and roughly dried my hair with it when I showed no inclination to use it myself.

  As the time of his arrival grew nearer, pacing in the hall was preferable to sitting in the salon. Ysabeau appeared and stood with her hands on her hips. I continued, despite her forbidding presence, until Marthe brought a wooden chair to the front door. She convinced me to sit, though the chair’s carving had clearly been designed to acquaint its occupants with the discomforts of hell, and Matthew’s mother retreated to the library.

  When the Range Rover entered the courtyard, I flew outside. For the first time in our relationship, Matthew didn’t beat me to the door. He was still straightening his long legs when my arms locked around his neck, my toes barely touching the ground.

  “Don’t do that again,” I whispered, my eyes shut against sudden tears. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  Matthew’s arms went around me, and he buried his face in my neck. We held each other without speaking. Matthew reached up and loosened my grip, gently setting me back on my feet. He cupped my face, and familiar touches of snow and frost melted on my skin. I committed new details of his features to memory, such as the tiny creases at the corners of his eyes and the precise curve of the hollow under his full lower lip.

  “Dieu,” he whispered in wonder, “I was wrong.”

  “Wrong?” My voice was panicky.

  “I thought I knew how much I missed you. But I had no idea.”

  “Tell me.” I wanted to hear again the words he’d said on the phone last night.

  “I love you, Diana. God help me, I trie
d not to.”

  My face softened into his hands. “I love you, too, Matthew, with all my heart.”

  Something in his body altered subtly at my response. It wasn’t his pulse, since he didn’t have much of a pulse, nor his skin, which remained deliciously cool. Instead there was a sound—a catch in his throat, a murmur of longing that sent a shock of desire through me. Matthew detected it, and his face grew fierce. He bent his head, fitting his cold lips to mine.

  The resulting changes in my body were neither slight nor subtle. My bones turned to fire, and my hands crept around his back and slid down. When he tried to draw away, I pulled his hips back toward me.

  Not so fast, I thought.

  His mouth hovered above mine in surprise. My hands slid lower, holding on to his backside possessively, and his breath caught again until it purred in his throat.

  “Diana,” he began, a note of caution in his voice.

  My kiss demanded he tell me what the problem was.

  Matthew’s only answer was to move his mouth against mine. He stroked the pulse in my neck, then floated his hand down to cup my left breast, now stroking the fabric over the sensitive skin between my arm and my heart. With his other hand at my waist, he pulled me more tightly against him.

  After a long while, Matthew loosened his hold enough that he could speak. “You are mine now.”

  My lips were too numb to reply, so I nodded and kept a firm grip on his backside.

  He stared down at me. “Still no doubts?”

  “None.”

  “We are one, from this moment forward. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.” I understood, at the very least, that no one and nothing was going to keep me from Matthew.

  “She has no idea.” Ysabeau’s voice rang through the courtyard. Matthew stiffened, his arms circling me protectively. “With that kiss you have broken every rule that holds our world together and keeps us safe. Matthew, you have marked that witch as your own. And, Diana, you have offered your witch’s blood—your power—to a vampire. You have turned your back on your own kind and pledged yourself to a creature who is your enemy.”