A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [138]
I traced the writing with my finger. This was my specialty—turning the scribbles of scientists into something sensible to everyone else. In his last note, Matthew had used a familiar technique to hide his thoughts. He’d written in a combination of French and Latin—and used an archaic abbreviation for daemons for good measure in which the consonants save the first and last had been replaced with lines over the vowels. That way no one paging through his book would see the word “daemons” and stop for a closer look.
“How are daemons made?” Matthew had wondered in 1859. He was still looking for the answer a century and a half later.
When Darwin began discussing the affinities between species, Matthew’s pen had been unable to stop racing across the page, making it nearly impossible to read the printed text. Against a passage explaining, “From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups,” Matthew had written “ORIGINS” in large black letters. A few lines down, another passage had been underlined twice: “The existence of groups would have been of simple signification, if one group had been exclusively fitted to inhabit the land, and another the water; one to feed on flesh, another on vegetable matter, and so on; but the case is widely different in nature; for it is notorious how commonly members of even the same subgroup have different habits.”
Did Matthew believe that the vampire diet was a habit rather than a defining characteristic of the species? Reading on, I found the next clue. “Finally, the several classes of facts which have been considered in this chapter, seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent.” In the margins Matthew had written “COMMON PARENTS” and “ce qui explique tout.”
The vampire believed that monogenesis explained everything—or at least he had in 1859. Matthew thought it was possible that daemons, humans, vampires, and witches shared common ancestors. Our considerable differences were matters of descent, habit, and selection. He had evaded me in his laboratory when I asked whether we were one species or four, but he couldn’t do so in his library.
Matthew remained fixated on his computer. Closing the covers of Aurora Consurgens to protect its pages and abandoning my search for a more ordinary Bible, I carried his copy of Darwin to the fire and curled up on the sofa. I opened it, intending to try to make sense of the vampire based on the notes he’d made in his book.
He was still a mystery to me—perhaps even more so here at Sept-Tours. Matthew in France was different from Matthew in England. He’d never lost himself in his work this way. Here his shoulders weren’t fiercely squared but relaxed, and he’d caught his lower lip in his slightly elongated, sharp cuspid as he typed. It was a sign of concentration, as was the crease between his eyes. Matthew was oblivious to my attention, his fingers flying over the keys, clattering on the computer with a considerable amount of force. He must go through laptops at quite a rate, given their delicate plastic parts. He reached the end of a sentence, leaned back in his chair, and stretched Then he yawned.
I’d never seen him yawn before. Was his yawn, like his lowered shoulders, a sign of relaxation? The day after we’d first met, Matthew had told me that he liked to know his environment. Here he knew every inch of the place—every smell was familiar, as was every creature who roamed nearby. And then there was his relationship with his mother and Marthe. They were a family, this odd assortment of vampires, and they had taken me in for Matthew’s sake.
I turned back to Darwin. But the bath, the warm fire, and the constant background noise of his clacking fingers lulled me to sleep.