A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [177]
And Matthew had applied it.
Hours later I was back in the medieval section of Matthew’s library and opened my last account book. This volume spanned the period from the late thirteenth century to the first half of the fourteenth century. The staggering sums were now expected, but around 1310 the number of entries increased dramatically. So, too, did the flow of money. A new annotation accompanied some of the names: a tiny red cross. In 1313, next to one of these marks, was a name I recognized: Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar.
He’d been burned at the stake for heresy in 1314. A year before he was executed, he’d turned over everything he owned to the Knights of Lazarus.
There were hundreds of names marked with red crosses. Were they all Templars? If so, then the mystery of the Templars was solved. The knights and their money hadn’t disappeared. Both had simply been absorbed into the order of Lazarus.
It couldn’t be true. Such a thing would have taken too much planning and coordination. And no one could have kept such a grand scheme secret. The idea was as implausible as stories about—
Witches and vampires.
The Knights of Lazarus were no more or less believable than I was.
As for conspiracy theories, their chief weakness was that they were so complex. No lifetime was sufficient to gather the necessary information, build the links between all the required elements, and then set the plans in motion. Unless, of course, the conspirators were vampires. If you were a vampire—or, better yet, a family of vampires—then the passage of time would matter little. As I knew from Matthew’s scholarly career, vampires had all the time they needed.
The enormity of what it meant to love a vampire struck home as I slid the account book back onto the shelf. It was not just his age that posed the difficulties, or his dining habits, or the fact that he had killed humans and would do so again. It was the secrets.
Matthew had been accumulating secrets—large ones like the Knights of Lazarus and his son Lucas, small ones like his relationships with William Harvey and Charles Darwin—for well over a millennium. My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them.
But it was not only vampires who kept secrets. All creatures learned to do so out of fear of discovery and to preserve something—anything—just for ourselves within our clannish, almost tribal, world. Matthew was not simply a hunter, a killer, a scientist, or a vampire, but a web of secrets, just as I was. For us to be together, we needed to decide which secrets to share and then let the others go.
The computer chimed in the quiet room when my finger pressed the power button. Marthe’s sandwiches were dry and the tea was cold, but I nibbled so that she wouldn’t think her efforts had gone unappreciated.
Finished, I sat back and stared into the fire. The Knights of Lazarus roused me as a historian, and my witch’s instincts told me the brotherhood was important to understanding Matthew. But their existence was not his most important secret. Matthew was guarding himself—his innermost nature.
What a complicated, delicate business it was going to be to love him. We were the stuff of fairy tales—vampires, witches, knights in shining armor. But there was a troubling reality to face. I had been threatened, and creatures watched me in the Bodleian in hopes I’d recall a book that everyone wanted but no one understood. Matthew’s laboratory had been targeted. And our relationship was destabilizing the fragile détente that had long existed among daemons, humans, vampires, and witches. This was a new world, in which creatures were pitted against creatures and a silent, secret army could be called into action by a stamp in a pool of black wax. It was no wonder that Matthew might prefer to put me aside.
I snuffed the candles and climbed the stairs to bed. Exhausted, I quickly drifted off, my dreams filled with knights, bronze seals, and endless books of