A Discovery of Witches(105)
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.