Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(13)
At present he was with Walter and I was devoting my attention to a small book while awaiting his return. He’d left his table by the window littered with bags of sharpened quills and glass pots full of ink. Other tools were scattered nearby: a stick of wax to seal his correspondence, a thin knife to open letters, a candle, a silver shaker. This last was full not of salt but sand, as my gritty eggs this morning had proved.
My table held a similar shaker to set the ink on the page and keep it from smudging, a single pot of black ink, and the remains of three pens. I was currently destroying a fourth in an effort to master the complicated swirls of Elizabethan handwriting. Making a to-do list should have been a snap. As a historian I had spent years reading old handwriting and knew exactly how the letters should look, what words were most common, and the erratic spelling choices that were mine to make in a time when there were few dictionaries and grammatical rules.
It turned out that the challenge lay not in knowing what to do but in actually doing it. After working for years to become an expert, I was a student again. Only this time my objective wasn’t to understand the past but to live in it. Thus far it had been a humbling experience, and all I’d managed was to make a mess of the first page of the pocket-size blank book Matthew had given me this morning.
“It’s the Elizabethan equivalent of a laptop computer,” he’d explained, handing me the slim volume. “You’re a woman of letters and need somewhere to put them.”
I cracked the tight binding, releasing the crisp smell of paper. Most virtuous women of the time used these little books for prayers. Diana There was a thick blot where I’d pressed down at the beginning of the D and by the time I reached the last A the pen was out of ink. Still, my effort was a perfectly respectable example of the period’s Italic hand. My hand moved far more slowly than Matthew’s did when he wrote letters using the squiggly Secretary script. That was the handwriting of lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, but too difficult for me at present.
Bishop That was even better. But my smile quickly dissolved, and I struck out my last name. I was married now. I dipped the pen in the ink. de Clermont
Diana de Clermont. That made me sound like a countess, not a historian. A drop of ink fell wetly onto the page below. I stifled a curse at the black splotch. Happily, it hadn’t obliterated my name. But that wasn’t my name either. I smudged the blob over “de Clermont.” You could still read it—barely. I steadied my hand and deliberately formed the correct letters.
Roydon. That was my name now. Diana Roydon, wife of the most obscure figure associated with the mysterious School of Night. I examined the page critically. My handwriting was a disaster. It looked nothing like what I’d seen of the chemist Robert Boyle’s neat, rounded script or that of his brilliant sister, Katherine. I hoped that women’s handwriting in the 1590s was far messier than it was in the 1690s. A few more strokes of the pen and a final flourish and I would be done.
Her Booke. Male voices sounded outside. I put down my pen with a frown and went to the window.
Matthew and Walter were below. The panes of glass muffled their words, but the subject of the conversation was evidently unpleasant, judging from Matthew’s harried expression and the bristling line of Raleigh’s eyebrows. When Matthew made a dismissive gesture and turned to walk away, Walter stopped him with a firm hand.
Something had been bothering Matthew since he’d received the first batch of mail this morning. A stillness had come over him, and he’d held the pouch without opening it. Though he’d explained that the letters dealt with ordinary estate business, surely there was more there than demands for taxes and bills due.
I pressed my warm palm against the cold pane as if it were only the glass that stood between me and Matthew. The play of temperatures reminded me of the contrast between warmblooded witch and cool-blooded vampire. I returned to my seat and picked up my pen.
“You decided to make your mark on the sixteenth century after all.” Matthew was suddenly at my side. The twitch at the corner of his mouth indicated amusement but didn’t entirely disguise his tension.
“I’m still not sure that creating a lasting memento of my time here is a good idea,” I confessed. “A future scholar might realize there’s something odd about it.” Just as Kit had known there was something wrong with me.
“Don’t worry. The book won’t leave the house.” Matthew reached for his stack of mail.
“You can’t be sure of that,” I protested.
“Let history take care of itself, Diana,” he said decisively, as if the matter were now closed. But I couldn’t let go of the future—or my worries about the effects that our presence in the past might have on it.
“And I still don’t think we should let Kit keep that chess piece.” The memory of Marlowe triumphantly brandishing the tiny figure of Diana haunted me. She occupied the role of the white queen in Matthew’s costly silver chess set and had been the third object I’d used to steer us to the proper place in the past, along with Ysabeau’s earring and Matthew’s copy of Kit’s play Doctor Faustus. Two unfamiliar young daemons, Sophie Norman and her husband Nathaniel Wilson, had unexpectedly delivered it to my aunts’ house in Madison just as we were deciding to timewalk.
“Kit won it from me fair and square last night—just as he was supposed to do. At least this time I could see how he managed it. He distracted me with his rook.” Matthew dashed off a note with enviable speed before folding the pages into a neat packet. He dropped a molten blob of vermilion across the edges of the letter before pressing his signet ring into it. The golden surface of the ring bore the simple glyph for the planet Jupiter, not the more elaborate emblem that Satu had burned into my flesh. The wax crackled as it cooled. “Somehow my white queen went from Kit to a family of witches in North Carolina. We have to believe that it will do so again, with or without our help.”