Shadow of Night (12 page)
“Don’t think you can best him,” Matthew warned. “You may be like my mother, as Gallowglass said, but even she gets caught in his web from time to time.”
“And are you still a member of the Congregation in the present? Is that how you knew that Knox and Domenico were members?” The witch Peter Knox had been stalking me since the moment I called up Ashmole 782 at the Bodleian. As for Domenico Michele, he was a vampire with old animosities when it came to the de Clermonts. He’d been present at La Pierre before yet another member of the Congregation tortured me.
“No,” Matthew said shortly, turning away.
“So what Hancock said about a de Clermont always being on the Congregation is no longer true?” I held my breath.
Say yes,
I urged him silently,
even if it’s a lie.
“It’s still true,” he said evenly, crushing my hope.
“Then who . . . ?” I trailed off. “Ysabeau? Baldwin? Surely not Marcus!”
I couldn’t believe that Matthew’s mother, his brother, or his son could be involved without someone letting it slip.
“There are creatures on my family tree that you don’t know, Diana. In any case, I’m not free to divulge the identity of the one who sits at the Congregation’s table.”
“Do any of the rules that bind the rest of us apply to your family?” I wondered. “You meddle in politics—I’ve seen the account books that prove it. Are you hoping that when we return to the present, this mysterious family member is going to somehow shield us from the Congregation’s wrath?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said tightly. “I’m not sure of anything. Not anymore.”
Our plans for departure took shape quickly. Walter and Gallowglass argued about the best route, while Matthew set his affairs in order.
Hancock was dispatched to London with Henry and a leather-wrapped packet of correspondence. As a peer of the realm, the earl was required at court for the celebrations of the queen’s anniversary on the seventeenth of November. George and Tom were packed off to Oxford with a substantial sum of money and a disgraced Marlowe. Hancock warned them of the dire consequences that would ensue if the daemon caused any more trouble. Matthew might be far away, but Hancock would be within sword’s reach and would not hesitate to strike if it was warranted. In addition, Matthew instructed George on exactly what questions about alchemical manuscripts he could ask the scholars of Oxford.
My own affairs were far simpler to arrange. I had few personal items to pack: Ysabeau’s earrings, my new shoes, a few items of clothing. Françoise turned all her attention to making me a sturdy, cinnamon-colored gown for the journey. Its high, fur-lined collar was designed to fasten closely and keep out the winds and rain. The silky fox pelts that Françoise stitched into the lining of my cloak would serve the same purpose, as would the bands of fur she inserted into the embroidered edges of my new gloves.
My last act at the Old Lodge was to take the book Matthew had given me to the library. It would be easy to lose such an item on the way to SeptTours, and I wanted my diary to be as safe from prying eyes as possible. I stooped to the rushes and picked up sprigs of rosemary and lavender. Then I went to Matthew’s desk and selected a quill and a pot of ink and made one final entry.
News from home. We are preparing for a journey.
After blowing gently on the words to set the ink, I slipped the rosemary and lavender into the crevice between the pages. My aunt used rosemary for memory spells and lavender to breathe a note of caution into love charms—a fitting combination for our present circumstances.
R
ima Jaén hated the month of November. The hours of daylight shrank, giving up their battle against the shadows a few moments earlier with each passing day. And it was a terrible time to be in Seville, with the whole city gearing up for the holiday season and rain just around the corner. The normally erratic driving habits of the city’s residents grew worse by the hour.
Rima had been stuck at her desk for weeks. Her boss had decided to clear out the storage rooms in the attic. Last winter the rain had made it through the ancient, cracked roof tiles on top of the decrepit house, and the forecast for the coming months was even worse. There was no money to fix the problem, so the maintenance staff was hauling moldy cardboard boxes down the stairs to make sure that nothing of value was damaged in future storms. Everything else was discreetly gotten rid of in such a way that no potential donors could discover what was afoot.
It was a dirty, deceitful business, but it had to be done, Rima reflected. The library was a small, specialist archive with scant resources. The core of its collections came from a prominent Andalusian family whose members could trace their roots back to the
reconquista,
when the Christians had taken back the peninsula from the Muslim warriors who had claimed it in the eighth century. Few scholars had reason to poke through the bizarre range of books and objects the Gonçalves had collected over the years. Most researchers were down the street at the Archivo General de Indias, arguing about Columbus. Her fellow
Sevillanos
wanted their libraries to have the latest thriller, not crumbling Jesuit instruction manuals from the 1700s and women’s fashion magazines from the 1800s.
Rima picked up the small volume sitting on the corner of her desk and swung a pair of brightly colored glasses down from the top of her head, where they were holding back her black hair. She’d noticed the book a week ago, when one of the maintenance workers had dropped a wooden crate before her with a grunt of displeasure. Since then she’d entered it into the collection as Gonçalve Manuscript 4890 along with the description
“English commonplace book, anonymous, late 16th century.”
Like most commonplace books, it was mostly blank. Rima had seen one Spanish example owned by a Gonçalve heir sent to the University of Seville in 1628. It had been finely bound, indexed, ruled, and paginated with ornate numbers set in swirls of multicolored ink. There was not a single word in it. Even in the past, people never quite lived up to their aspirations.
Commonplace books like this one were repositories for biblical passages, snatches of poetry, mottoes, and the sayings of classical authors. They typically included doodles and shopping lists as well as lyrics to bawdy songs and accounts of strange and important events. This one was no different, Rima thought as her black eyes darted over the pages. Sadly, someone had ripped out the first page. Once it had probably borne the owner’s name. Without it there was virtually no chance of identifying the owner, or any of the other people mentioned only by initials. Historians were far less interested in this sort of nameless, faceless evidence, as though its anonymity somehow made the person behind it less important.
On the remaining pages there was a chart listing all the English coinage in use in the sixteenth century and its relative worth. One page in the back had a hastily scribbled list of clothing: a cloak, two pairs of shoes, a gown trimmed in fur, six smocks, four petticoats, and a pair of gloves. There were a few dated entries that made no sense at all and a headache cure—a caudle, made with milk and wine. Rima smiled and wondered if it would work on her migraines.
She should have returned the little volume to the locked rooms on the third floor where the manuscripts were stored, but something about it made her want to keep it nearby. It was clear that a woman had written it. The round hand was endearingly shaky and uncertain, and the words snaked up and down on pages liberally sprinkled with inkblots. No learned sixteenth-century man wrote like that, unless he was ill or aged. This book’s author was neither. There was a curious vibrancy to the entries that was strangely at odds with the tentative handwriting.
She had shown the manuscript to Javier López, the charming yet entirely unqualified person hired by the last of the Gonçalves to transform the family’s house and personal effects into a library and museum. His expansive ground-floor office was paneled in fine mahogany and had the only working heaters in the building. During their brief interview, he’d dismissed her suggestion that the book deserved more careful study. He also forbade her to take photographs of it so she could share the images with colleagues in the United Kingdom. As for her belief that the book’s owner had been a woman, the director had muttered something about feminists and waved her out of his office.
And so the book remained on her desk. In Seville such a book would always be unwanted and unimportant. Nobody came to Spain to look for English commonplace books. They went to the British Library, or the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States.
There was that strange man who came by now and again to comb through the collections. He was French, and his appraising stare made Rima uncomfortable. Herbert Cantal—or maybe it was Gerbert Cantal. She couldn’t remember. He’d left a card on his last visit and had encouraged her to get in touch if anything interesting turned up. When Rima asked what, exactly, might qualify, the man had said he was interested in everything. It was not the most helpful of responses.
Now something interesting
had
turned up. Unfortunately, the man’s business card had not, though she’d cleaned out her desk in an effort to locate it. Rima would have to wait until he appeared again to share this little book with him. Perhaps he would be more interested in it than her boss was.
Rima flipped through the pages. There was a tiny sprig of lavender and a few crumbling rosemary leaves pressed between two of the pages. She hadn’t seen them before and picked them carefully from the crevice of the binding. For a moment there was a trace of scent in the faded bloom, forging a connection between herself and a person who had lived hundreds of years ago. Rima smiled wistfully, thinking about the woman she would never know.
“Más basura.”
Daniel from building maintenance was back, his worn gray overalls grimy from transporting boxes from the attic. He slid several more boxes off the beaten-up dolly and onto the floor. In spite of the cool weather, sweat stood out on his forehead, and he wiped it off with his sleeve, leaving a smudge of black dust.
“Café?”
It was the third time this week he’d asked her out. Rima knew that he found her attractive. Her mother’s Berber ancestry appealed to some men—not surprising, since it had bestowed upon her soft curves, warm skin, and almond-shaped eyes. Daniel had been muttering salacious comments, brushing against her backside when she went to the mail room, and ogling her breasts for years. That he was five inches shorter than she and twice her age didn’t seem to deter him.
Rima replied.
Daniel’s grunt was infused with deep skepticism. He glanced back at the boxes as he left. The one on top held a moldering fur muff and a stuffed wren attached to a piece of cedar. Daniel shook his head, astonished that she would prefer to spend her time with dead animals than with him.
“Gracias,”
Rima murmured as he departed. She closed the book gently and returned it to its place on her desk.
While she transferred the box’s contents to a nearby table, Rima’s eyes strayed back to the little volume in its simple leather cover. In four hundred years, would the only proof of her existence be a page from her calendar, a shopping list, and a scrap of paper with her grandmother’s recipe for
alfajores
on it, all placed in a file labeled
“Anonymous, of no importance”
and stored in an archive no one ever visited?
Such dark thoughts were bound to be unlucky. Rima shivered and touched the hand-shaped amulet of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. It hung around her neck on a leather cord and had been passed down among the women of her family for as long as anyone could remember.
“Khamsa fi ainek,”
she whispered, hoping her words would ward off any evil spirit she might have unwittingly called.
