A Discovery of Witches(22)
I showered and dressed in loose trousers and a turtleneck. Their unalleviated black accentuated my height and minimized my athletic build, but it also made me resemble a corpse, so I tied a soft periwinkle sweater around my shoulders. That made the circles under my eyes look bluer, but at least I no longer looked dead. My hair threatened to stand straight up from my head and crackled every time I moved. The only solution for it was to scrape it back into a messy knot at the nape of my neck.
Clairmont’s trolley had been stuffed with manuscripts, and I was resigned to seeing him in Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room. I approached the call desk with shoulders squared.
Once again the supervisor and both attendants were flapping around like nervous birds. This time their activity was focused on the triangle between the call desk, the manuscript card catalogs, and the supervisor’s office. They carried stacks of boxes and pushed carts loaded with manuscripts under the watchful eyes of the gargoyles and into the first three bays of ancient desks.
“Thank you, Sean.” Clairmont’s deep, courteous voice floated from their depths.
The good news was that I would no longer have to share a desk with a vampire.
The bad news was that I couldn’t enter or leave the library—or call a book or manuscript—without Clairmont’s tracking my every move. And today he had backup.
A diminutive girl was stacking up papers and file folders in the second alcove. She was dressed in a long, baggy brown sweater that reached almost to her knees. When she turned, I was startled to see a full-grown adult. Her eyes were amber and black, and as cold as frostbite.
Even without their touch, her luminous, pale skin and unnaturally thick, glossy hair gave her away as a vampire. Snaky waves of it undulated around her face and over her shoulders. She took a step toward me, making no effort to disguise the swift, sure movements, and gave me a withering glance. This was clearly not where she wanted to be, and she blamed me.
“Miriam,” Clairmont called softly, walking out into the center aisle. He stopped short, and a polite smile shaped his lips. “Dr. Bishop. Good morning.” He raked his fingers through his hair, which only made it look more artfully tousled. I patted my own hair self-consciously and tucked a stray strand behind my ear.
“Good morning, Professor Clairmont. Back again, I see.”
“Yes. But today I won’t be joining you in the Selden End. They’ve been able to accommodate us here, where we won’t disturb anyone.”
The female vampire rapped a stack of papers sharply against the top of the desk.
Clairmont smiled. “May I introduce my research colleague, Dr. Miriam Shephard. Miriam, this is Dr. Diana Bishop.”
“Dr. Bishop,” Miriam said coolly, extending her hand in my direction. I took it and felt a shock at the contrast between her tiny, cold hand and my own larger, warmer one. I began to draw back, but her grip grew firmer, crushing the bones together. When she finally let go, I had to resist the urge to shake out my hand.
“Dr. Shephard.” The three of us stood awkwardly. What were you supposed to ask a vampire first thing in the morning? I fell back on human platitudes. “I should really get to work.”
“Have a productive day,” Clairmont said, his nod as cool as Miriam’s greeting.
Mr. Johnson appeared at my elbow, my small stack of gray boxes waiting in his arms.
“We’ve got you in A4 today, Dr. Bishop,” he said with a pleased puff of his cheeks. “I’ll just carry these back for you.” Clairmont’s shoulders were so broad that I couldn’t see around him to tell if there were bound manuscripts on his desk. I stifled my curiosity and followed the reading-room supervisor to my familiar seat in the Selden End.
Even without Clairmont sitting across from me, I was acutely aware of him as I took out my pencils and turned on my computer. My back to the empty room, I picked up the first box, pulled out the leather-bound manuscript, and placed it in the cradle.
The familiar task of reading and taking notes soon absorbed my attention, and I finished with the first manuscript in less than two hours. My watch revealed that it was not yet eleven. There was still time for another before lunch.
The manuscript inside the next box was smaller than the last, but it contained interesting sketches of alchemical apparatus and snippets of chemical procedures that read like some unholy combination of Joy of Cooking and a poisoner’s notebook. “Take your pot of mercury and seethe it over a flame for three hours,” began one set of instructions, “and when it has joined with the Philosophical Child take it and let it putrefy until the Black Crow carries it away to its death.” My fingers flew over the keyboard, picking up momentum as the minutes ticked by.
I had prepared myself to be stared at today by every creature imaginable. But when the clocks chimed one, I was still virtually alone in the Selden End. The only other reader was a graduate student wearing a red-, white-, and blue-striped Keble College scarf. He stared morosely at a stack of rare books without reading them and bit his nails with occasional loud clicks.
After filling out two new request slips and packing up my manuscripts, I left my seat for lunch, satisfied with the morning’s accomplishments. Gillian Chamberlain stared at me malevolently from an uncomfortable-looking seat near the ancient clock as I passed by, the two female vampires from yesterday drove icicles into my skin, and the daemon from the music reference room had picked up two other daemons. The three of them were dismantling a microfilm reader, the parts scattered all around them and a roll of film unspooling, unnoticed, on the floor at their feet.