A Discovery of Witches(20)

“A gorgeous scientist is exactly what you need. You need a challenge—and a life.”

“Look who’s talking. What time did you leave the lab yesterday? Besides, there’s already one gorgeous scientist in my life,” I teased.

“No changing the subject.”

“Oxford is such a small town, I’m bound to keep running into him. And he seems to be a big deal around here.” Not strictly true, I thought, crossing my fingers, but close enough. “I’ve looked up his work and can understand some of it, but I must be missing something, because it doesn’t seem to fit together.”

“Tell me he’s not an astrophysicist,” Chris said. “You know I’m weak on physics.”

“You’re supposed to be a genius.”

“I am,” he said promptly. “But my genius doesn’t extend to card games or physics. Name, please.” Chris tried to be patient, but no one’s brain moved fast enough for him.

“Matthew Clairmont.” His name caught in the back of my throat, just as the scent of cloves had the night before.

Chris whistled. “The elusive, reclusive Professor Clairmont.” Gooseflesh rose on my arms. “What did you do, put him under a spell with those eyes of yours?”

Since Chris didn’t know I was a witch, his use of the word “spell” was entirely accidental. “He admires my work on Boyle.”

“Right,” Chris scoffed. “You turned those crazy blue-and-gold starbursts on him and he was thinking about Boyle’s law? He’s a scientist, Diana, not a monk. And he is a big deal, incidentally.”

“Really?” I said faintly.

“Really. He was a phenom, just like you, and started publishing while he was still a grad student. Good stuff, not crap—work you’d be happy to have your name on if you managed to produce it over the course of a career.”

I scanned my notes, scratched out on a yellow legal pad. “This was his study of neural mechanisms and the prefrontal cortex?”

“You’ve done your homework,” he said approvingly. “I didn’t follow much of Clairmont’s early work—his chemistry is what interests me—but his publications on wolves caused a lot of excitement.”

“How come?”

“He had amazing instincts—why the wolves picked certain places to live, how they formed social groups, how they mated. It was almost like he was a wolf, too.”

“Maybe he is.” I tried to keep my voice light, but something bitter and envious bloomed in my mouth and it came out harshly instead.

Matthew Clairmont didn’t have a problem using his preternatural abilities and thirst for blood to advance his career. If the vampire had been making the decisions about Ashmole 782 on Friday night, he would have touched the manuscript’s illustrations. I was sure of it.

“It would have been easier to explain the quality of his work if he were a wolf,” Chris said patiently, ignoring my tone. “Since he isn’t, you just have to admit he’s very good. He was elected to the Royal Society on the basis of it, after they published his findings. People were calling him the next Attenborough. After that, he dropped out of sight for a while.”

I’ll bet he did. “Then he popped up again, doing evolution and chemistry?”

“Yeah, but his interest in evolution was a natural progression from the wolves.”

“So what is it about his chemistry that interests you?”

Chris’s voice got tentative. “Well, he’s behaving like a scientist does when he’s discovered something big.”

“I don’t understand.” I frowned.

“We get jumpy and weird. We hide in our labs and don’t go to conferences for fear we might say something and help someone else have a breakthrough.”

“You behave like wolves.” I now knew a great deal about wolves. The possessive, guarded behaviors Chris described fit the Norwegian wolf nicely.

“Exactly.” Chris laughed. “He hasn’t bitten anyone or been caught howling at the moon?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I murmured. “Has Clairmont always been so reclusive?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask,” Chris admitted. “He does have a medical degree, and must have seen patients, although he never had any reputation as a clinician. And the wolves liked him. But he hasn’t been at any of the obvious conferences in the past three years.” He paused. “Wait a minute, though, there was something a few years back.”

“What?”

“He gave a paper—I can’t remember the particulars—and a woman asked him a question. It was a smart question, but he was dismissive. She was persistent. He got irritated and then mad. A friend who was there said he’d never seen anybody go from courteous to furious so fast.”

I was already typing, trying to find information about the controversy. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, huh? There’s no sign of the ruckus online.”

“I’m not surprised. Chemists don’t air their dirty laundry in public. It hurts all of us at grant time. We don’t want the bureaucrats thinking we’re high-strung megalomaniacs. We leave that to the physicists.”

“Does Clairmont get grants?”

“Oho. Yes. He’s funded up to his eyeballs. Don’t you worry about Professor Clairmont’s career. He may have a reputation for being contemptuous of women, but it hasn’t dried up the money. His work is too good for that.”