A Discovery of Witches

by Deborah Harkness

  “I suspect we’ve seen more than that—like the way you move with your eyes closed, your ability to communicate with Rakasa, and your sparkly fingers. We just don’t have names for them yet.”

  “Please tell me that’s all.”

  Matthew hesitated. “Not quite.” He flipped to another page. “We can’t yet identify these markers. In most cases we have to correlate accounts of a witch’s activities—some of them centuries old—with DNA evidence. It can be hard to match them up.”

  “Do the tests explain why my magic is emerging now?”

  “We don’t need a test for that. Your magic is behaving as if it’s waking after a long sleep. All that inactivity has made it restless, and now it wants to have its way. Blood will out,” Matthew said lightly. He rocked gracefully to his feet and lifted me up. “You’ll catch cold sitting on the ground, and I’ll have a hell of a time explaining myself to Marthe if you get sick.” He whistled to the horses. They strolled in our direction, still munching on their unexpected treat.

  We rode for another hour, exploring the woods and fields around Sept-Tours. Matthew pointed out the best place to hunt rabbits and where his father had taught him to shoot a crossbow without taking out his own eye. When we turned back to the stables, my worries over the test results had been replaced with a pleasant feeling of exhaustion.

  “My muscles will be sore tomorrow,” I said, groaning. “I haven’t been on a horse for years.”

  “Nobody would have guessed that from the way that you rode today,” he said. We passed out of the forest and entered the château’s stone gate. “You’re a good rider, Diana, but you mustn’t go out by yourself. It’s too easy to lose your way.”

  Matthew wasn’t worried I’d get lost. He was worried I’d be found.

  “I won’t.”

  His long fingers relaxed on the reins. He’d been clutching them for the past five minutes. This vampire was used to giving orders that were obeyed instantly. He wasn’t accustomed to making requests and negotiating agreements. And his usual quick temper was nowhere in evidence.

  Sidling Rakasa closer to Dahr, I reached over and raised Matthew’s palm to my mouth. My lips were warm against his hard, cold flesh.

  His pupils dilated in surprise.

  I let go and, clucking Rakasa forward, headed into the stables.

  Chapter 20

  Ysabeau was mercifully absent at lunch. Afterward I wanted to go straight to Matthew’s study and start examining Aurora Consurgens, but he convinced me to take a bath first. It would, he promised, make the inevitable muscle stiffness more bearable. Halfway upstairs, I had to stop and rub a cramp in my leg. I was going to pay for the morning’s enthusiasm.

  The bath was heavenly—long, hot, and relaxing. I put on loose black trousers, a sweater, and a pair of socks and padded downstairs, where a fire was blazing. My flesh turned orange and red as I held my hands out to the flames. What would it be like to control fire? My fingers tingled in response to the question, and I slid them safely into my pockets.

  Matthew looked up from his desk. “Your manuscript is next to your computer.”

  Its black covers drew me as surely as a magnet. I sat down at the table and opened them, holding the book carefully. The colors were even brighter than I remembered. After staring at the queen for several minutes, I turned the first page.

  “Incipit tractatus Aurora Consurgens intitulatus.” The words were familiar—“Here begins the treatise called the Rising of the Dawn”—but I still felt the shiver of pleasure associated with seeing a manuscript for the first time. “Everything good comes to me along with her. She is known as the Wisdom of the South, who calls out in the streets, and to the multitudes,” I read silently, translating from the Latin. It was a beautiful work, full of paraphrases from Scripture as well as other texts.

  “Do you have a Bible up here?” It would be wise for me to have one handy as I made my way through the manuscript.

  “Yes—but I’m not sure where it is. Do you want me to look for it?” Matthew rose slightly from his chair, but his eyes were still glued to his computer screen.

  “No, I’ll find it.” I got up and ran my finger down the edge of the nearest shelf. Matthew’s books were arranged not by size but in a running time line. Those on the first bookshelf were so ancient that I couldn’t bear to think about what they contained—the lost works of Aristotle, perhaps? Anything was possible.

  Roughly half of Matthew’s books were shelved spine in to protect the books’ fragile edges. Many of these had identifying marks written along the edges of the pages, and thick black letters spelled out a title here, an author’s name there. Halfway around the room, the books began to appear spine out, their titles and authors embossed in gold and silver.

  I slid past the manuscripts with their thick and bumpy pages, some with small Greek letters on the front edge. I kept going, looking for a large, fat, printed book. My index finger froze in front of one bound in brown leather and covered with gilding.

  “Matthew, please tell me ‘Biblia Sacra 1450’ is not what I think it is.”

  “Okay, it’s not what you think it is,” he said automatically, fingers racing over the keys with more than human speed. He was paying little attention to what I was doing and none at all to what I was saying.

  Leaving Gutenberg’s Bible where it was, I continued along the shelves, hoping that it wasn’t the only one available to me. My finger froze again at a book labeled Will’s Playes. “Were these books given to you by friends?”

  “Most of them.” Matthew didn’t even look up.

  Like German printing, the early days of English drama were a subject for later discussion.

  For the most part, Matthew’s books were in pristine condition. This was not entirely surprising, given their owner. Some, though, were well worn. A slender, tall book on the bottom shelf, for instance, had corners so torn and thin you could see the wooden boards peeking through the leather. Curious to see what had made this book a favorite, I pulled it out and opened the pages. It was Vesalius’s anatomy book from 1543, the first to depict dissected human bodies in exacting detail.

  Now hunting for fresh insights into Matthew, I sought out the next book to show signs of heavy use. This time it was a smaller, thicker volume. Inked onto the fore edge was the title De motu. William Harvey’s study of the circulation of the blood and his explanation of how the heart pumped must have been interesting reading for vampires when it was first published in the 1620s, though they must already have had some notion that this might be the case.

  Matthew’s well-worn books included works on electricity, microscopy, and physiology. But the most battered book I’d seen yet was resting on the nineteenth-century shelves: a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

  Sneaking a glance at Matthew, I pulled the book off the shelf with the stealth of a shoplifter. Its green cloth binding, with the title and author stamped in gold, was frayed with wear. Matthew had written his name in a beautiful copperplate script on the flyleaf.

  There was a letter folded inside.

  “Dear Sir,” it began. “Your letter of 15 October has reached me at last. I am mortified at my slow reply. I have for many years been collecting all the facts which I could in regard to the variation and origin of species, and your approval of my reasonings comes as welcome news as my book will soon pass into the publisher’s hands.” It was signed “C. Darwin,” and the date was 1859.

  The two men had been exchanging letters just weeks prior to Origin’s publication in November.

  The book’s pages were covered with the vampire’s notes in pencil and ink, leaving hardly an inch of blank paper. Three chapters were annotated even more heavily than the rest. They were the chapters on instinct, hybridism, and the affinities between the species.

  Like Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of blood, Darwin’s seventh chapter, on natural instincts, must have been page-turning reading for vampires. Matthew had underlined specific passages and written above
and below the lines as well as in the margins as he grew more excited by Darwin’s ideas. “Hence, we may conclude, that domestic instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident.” Matthew’s scribbled remarks included questions about which instincts might have been acquired and whether accidents were possible in nature. “Can it be that we have maintained as instincts what humans have given up through accident and habit?” he asked across the bottom margin. There was no need for me to ask who was included in “we.” He meant creatures—not just vampires, but witches and daemons, too.

  In the chapter on hybridism, Matthew’s interest had been caught by the problems of crossbreeding and sterility. “First crosses between forms sufficiently distinct to be ranked as species, and their hybrids,” Darwin wrote, “are very generally, but not universally, sterile.” A sketch of a family tree crowded the margins next to the underlined passage. There was a question mark where the roots belonged and four branches. “Why has inbreeding not led to sterility or madness?” Matthew wondered in the tree’s trunk. At the top of the page, he had written, “1 species or 4?” and “comment sont faites les dāēōs?”

  I traced the writing with my finger. This was my specialty—turning the scribbles of scientists into something sensible to everyone else. In his last note, Matthew had used a familiar technique to hide his thoughts. He’d written in a combination of French and Latin—and used an archaic abbreviation for daemons for good measure in which the consonants save the first and last had been replaced with lines over the vowels. That way no one paging through his book would see the word “daemons” and stop for a closer look.

  “How are daemons made?” Matthew had wondered in 1859. He was still looking for the answer a century and a half later.

  When Darwin began discussing the affinities between species, Matthew’s pen had been unable to stop racing across the page, making it nearly impossible to read the printed text. Against a passage explaining, “From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups,” Matthew had written “ORIGINS” in large black letters. A few lines down, another passage had been underlined twice: “The existence of groups would have been of simple signification, if one group had been exclusively fitted to inhabit the land, and another the water; one to feed on flesh, another on vegetable matter, and so on; but the case is widely different in nature; for it is notorious how commonly members of even the same subgroup have different habits.”

  Did Matthew believe that the vampire diet was a habit rather than a defining characteristic of the species? Reading on, I found the next clue. “Finally, the several classes of facts which have been considered in this chapter, seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent.” In the margins Matthew had written “COMMON PARENTS” and “ce qui explique tout.”

  The vampire believed that monogenesis explained everything—or at least he had in 1859. Matthew thought it was possible that daemons, humans, vampires, and witches shared common ancestors. Our considerable differences were matters of descent, habit, and selection. He had evaded me in his laboratory when I asked whether we were one species or four, but he couldn’t do so in his library.

  Matthew remained fixated on his computer. Closing the covers of Aurora Consurgens to protect its pages and abandoning my search for a more ordinary Bible, I carried his copy of Darwin to the fire and curled up on the sofa. I opened it, intending to try to make sense of the vampire based on the notes he’d made in his book.

  He was still a mystery to me—perhaps even more so here at Sept-Tours. Matthew in France was different from Matthew in England. He’d never lost himself in his work this way. Here his shoulders weren’t fiercely squared but relaxed, and he’d caught his lower lip in his slightly elongated, sharp cuspid as he typed. It was a sign of concentration, as was the crease between his eyes. Matthew was oblivious to my attention, his fingers flying over the keys, clattering on the computer with a considerable amount of force. He must go through laptops at quite a rate, given their delicate plastic parts. He reached the end of a sentence, leaned back in his chair, and stretched Then he yawned.

  I’d never seen him yawn before. Was his yawn, like his lowered shoulders, a sign of relaxation? The day after we’d first met, Matthew had told me that he liked to know his environment. Here he knew every inch of the place—every smell was familiar, as was every creature who roamed nearby. And then there was his relationship with his mother and Marthe. They were a family, this odd assortment of vampires, and they had taken me in for Matthew’s sake.

  I turned back to Darwin. But the bath, the warm fire, and the constant background noise of his clacking fingers lulled me to sleep. I woke up covered with a blanket, On the Origin of Species lying on the floor nearby, neatly closed with a slip of paper marking my place.

  I flushed.

  I’d been caught snooping.

  “Good evening,” Matthew said from the sofa opposite. He slid a piece of paper into the book that he was reading and rested it on his knee. “Can I interest you in some wine?”

  Wine sounded very, very good. “Yes, please.”

  Matthew went to a small eighteenth-century table near the landing. There was a bottle with no label, the cork pulled and lying at its side. He poured two glasses and carried one to me before he sat down. I sniffed, anticipating his first question.

  “Raspberries and rocks.”

  “For a witch you’re really quite good at this.” Matthew nodded in approval.

  “What is it that I’m drinking?” I asked, taking a sip. “Is it ancient? Rare?”

  Matthew put his head back and laughed. “Neither. It was probably put in the bottle about five months ago. It’s local wine, from vineyards down the road. Nothing fancy, nothing special.”

  It may not have been fancy or special, but it was fresh and tasted woody and earthy like the air around Sept-Tours.

  “I see that you gave up your search for a Bible in favor of something more scientific. Were you enjoying Darwin?” he asked mildly after watching me drink for a few moments.

  “Do you still believe that creatures and humans are descended from common parents? Is it really possible that the differences between us are merely racial?”

  He made a small sound of impatience. “I told you in the lab that I didn’t know.”

  “You were sure in 1859. And you thought that drinking blood might be simply a dietary habit, not a mark of differentiation.”

  “Do you know how many scientific advances have taken place between Darwin’s time and today? It’s a scientist’s prerogative to change his mind as new information comes to light.” He drank some wine and rested the glass against his knee, turning it this way and that so the firelight played on the liquid inside. “Besides, there’s no longer much scientific evidence for human notions of racial distinctions. Modern research suggests that most ideas about race are nothing more than an outmoded human method for explaining easily observable differences between themselves and someone else.”

  “The question of why you’re here—how we’re all here—really does consume you,” I said slowly. “I could see it on every page of Darwin’s book.”

  Matthew studied his wine. “It’s the only question worth asking.”

  His voice was soft, but his profile was stern, with its sharp lines and heavy brow. I wanted to smooth the lines and lift his features into a smile but remained seated while the firelight danced over his white skin and dark hair. Matthew picked up his book again, cradling it in one set of long fingers while his wineglass rested in the other.

  I stare
d at the fire as the light dimmed. When a clock on the desk struck seven, Matthew put down his book. “Should we join Ysabeau in the salon before dinner?”

  “Yes,” I replied, squaring my shoulders slightly. “But let me change first.” My wardrobe couldn’t hold a candle to Ysabeau’s, but I didn’t want Matthew to be completely ashamed of me. As ever, he looked ready for a boardroom or a Milan catwalk in a simple pair of black wool trousers and a fresh selection from his endless supply of sweaters. My recent close encounters with them had convinced me they were all cashmere—thick and luscious.

  Upstairs, I rooted through the items in my duffel bag and selected a gray pair of trousers and a sapphire blue sweater made out of finely spun wool with a tight, funnel-shaped neck and bell-shaped sleeves. My hair had a wave in it thanks to my earlier bath and the fact that it had finished drying scrunched under my head on the sofa.

  With the minimum conditions of presentability met, I slid on my loafers and started down the stairs. Matthew’s keen ears had picked up the sound of my movements, and he met me on the landing. When he saw me, his eyes lit up and his smile was wide and slow.

  “I like you in blue as much as I like you in black. You look beautiful,” he murmured, kissing me formally on both cheeks. The blood moved toward them as Matthew lifted my hair around my shoulders, the strands falling through his long white fingers. “Now, don’t let Ysabeau get under your skin no matter what she says.”

  “I’ll try,” I said with a little laugh, looking up at him uncertainly.

  When we reached the salon, Marthe and Ysabeau were already there. His mother was surrounded by newspapers written in every major European language, as well as one in Hebrew and another in Arabic. Marthe, on the other hand, was reading a paperback murder mystery with a lurid cover, her black eyes darting over the lines of print with enviable speed.

  “Good evening, Maman,” Matthew said, moving to give Ysabeau a kiss on each cold cheek. Her nostrils flared as he moved his body from one side to the other, and her cold eyes fixed on mine angrily.