A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [224]
“Feel what?” Matthew’s face was puzzled.
Unsure what would make an impression on his preternatural senses, I concentrated on the chain that had unfurled when he’d first kissed me. When I touched it with an imaginary finger, it emitted a low, steady hum.
Matthew gasped, a look of wonder on his face. “I can hear something. What is it?” He bent to rest his ear against my chest.
“It’s you, inside me,” I said. “You ground me—an anchor at the end of a long, silvery chain. It’s why I’m so certain of you, I suppose.” My voice dropped. “Provided I could feel you—had this connection to you—there was nothing Satu could say or do that I couldn’t endure.”
“It’s like the sound your blood makes when you talk to Rakasa with your mind, or when you called the witchwind. Now that I know what to listen for, it’s audible.”
Ysabeau had mentioned she could hear my witch’s blood singing. I tried to make the chain’s music louder, its vibrations passing into the rest of my body.
Matthew lifted his head and gave me a glorious smile. “Amazing.”
The humming grew more intense, and I lost control of the energy pulsing through me. Overhead, a score of stars burst into life and shot through the room.
“Oops.” Dozens of ghostly eyes tingled against my back. The house shut the door firmly against the inquiring looks of my ancestors, who had assembled to see the fireworks display as if it were Independence Day.
“Did you do that?” Matthew stared intently at the closed door.
“No,” I explained earnestly. “The sparklers were mine. That was the house. It has a thing about privacy.”
“Thank God,” he murmured, pulling my hips firmly to his and kissing me again in a way that had the ghosts on the other side muttering.
The fireworks fizzled out in a stream of aquamarine light over the chest of drawers.
“I love you, Matthew Clairmont,” I said at the earliest opportunity.
“And I love you, Diana Bishop,” he replied formally. “But your aunt and Emily must be freezing. Show me the rest of the house so that they can come inside.”
Slowly we went through the other rooms on the second floor, most unused now and filled with assorted bric-a-brac from Em’s yard-sale addiction and all the junk Sarah couldn’t bear to throw away for fear she might need it one day.
Matthew helped me up the stairs to the attic bedroom where I’d endured my adolescence. It still had posters of musicians tacked to the walls and sported the strong shades of purple and green that were a teenager’s attempt at a sophisticated color scheme.
Downstairs, we explored the big formal rooms built to receive guests—the keeping room on one side of the front door and the office and small parlor opposite. We passed through the rarely used dining room and into the heart of the house—a family room large enough to serve as TV room and eating area, with the kitchen at the far end.
“It looks like Em’s taken up needlepoint—again,” I said, picking up a half-finished canvas with a basket of flowers on it. “And Sarah’s fallen off the wagon.”
“She’s a smoker?” Matthew gave the air a long sniff.
“When she’s stressed. Em makes her smoke outside—but you can still smell it. Does it bother you?” I asked, acutely aware of how sensitive he might be to the odor.
“Dieu, Diana, I’ve smelled worse,” he replied.
The cavernous kitchen retained its wall of brick ovens and a gigantic walk-in fireplace. There were modern appliances, too, and old stone floors that had endured two centuries of dropped pans, wet animals, muddy shoes, and other more witchy substances. I ushered him into Sarah’s adjacent workroom. Originally a freestanding summer kitchen, it was now connected to the house and still equipped with cranes for holding cauldrons of stew and spits for roasting meat. Herbs hung from the ceiling, and a storage loft held drying fruits and jars of her lotions and potions. The tour over, we returned to the kitchen
“This room is so brown.” I studied the decor while flicking the porch light on and off again, the Bishops’ long-standing signal that it was safe to enter. There was a brown refrigerator, brown wooden