A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [124]
“What did Marthe say?” I whispered, remembering too late that there were few conversations, whispered or shouted, that would not be overheard by everyone in the house.
“She said we looked well together.”
“I don’t want Ysabeau to be furious with me the whole time we’re here.”
“Pay no attention to her,” he said serenely. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”
We passed through a doorway into a long room with a wide assortment of chairs and tables of many different styles and periods. There were two fireplaces, and two knights in glistening armor jousted over one of them, their bright lances crossing neatly without a drop of bloodshed. The fresco had clearly been painted by the same dewy-eyed chivalric enthusiast who’d decorated the hall. A pair of doors led to another room, this one lined with bookcases.
“Is that a library?” I asked, Ysabeau’s hostility momentarily forgotten. “Can I see your copy of Aurora Consurgens now?”
“Later,” Matthew said firmly. “You’re going to eat something and then sleep.”
He led the way to another curving staircase, navigating through the labyrinth of ancient furniture with the ease of long experience. My own passage was more tentative, and my thighs grazed a bow-fronted chest of drawers, setting a tall porcelain vase swaying. When we finally reached the bottom of the staircase, Matthew paused.
“It’s a long climb, and you’re tired. Do you need me to carry you?”
“No,” I said indignantly. “You are not going to sling me over your shoulder like a victorious medieval knight making off with the spoils of battle.”
Matthew pressed his lips together, eyes dancing.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me.”
He did laugh, the sound bouncing off the stone walls as if a pack of amused vampires were standing in the stairwell. This was, after all, precisely the kind of place where knights would have carried women upstairs. But I didn’t plan on being counted among them.
By the fifteenth tread, my sides were heaving with effort. The tower’s worn stone steps were not made for ordinary feet and legs—they had clearly been designed for vampires like Matthew who were either over six feet tall, extremely agile, or both. I gritted my teeth and kept climbing. Around a final bend in the stairs, a room opened up suddenly.
“Oh.” My hand traveled to my mouth in amazement.
I didn’t have to be told whose room this was. It was Matthew’s, through and through.
We were in the château’s graceful round tower—the one that still had its smooth, conical copper roof and was set on the back of the massive main building. Tall, narrow windows punctuated the walls, their leaded panes letting in slashes of light and autumn colors from the fields and trees outside.
The room was circular, and high bookcases smoothed its graceful curves into occasional straight lines. A large fireplace was set squarely into the walls that butted up against the château’s central structure. This fireplace had miraculously escaped the attention of the nineteenth-century fresco painter. There were armchairs and couches, tables and hassocks, most in shades of green, brown, and gold. Despite the size of the room and the expanses of gray stone, the overall effect was of cozy warmth.
The room’s most intriguing objects were those Matthew had chosen to keep from one of his many lives. A painting by Vermeer was propped up on a bookshelf next to a shell. It was unfamiliar—not one of the artist’s few known canvases. The subject looked an awful lot like Matthew. A broadsword so long and heavy that no one but a vampire could have wielded it hung over the fireplace, and a Matthew-size suit of armor stood in one corner. Opposite, there was an ancient-looking human skeleton hanging from a wooden stand, the bones tied together with something resembling piano wire. On the table next to it were two microscopes, both made in the seventeenth century unless I was very much mistaken. An ornate crucifix studded with