A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [245]
Sarah gave it a long sniff. “No, it just smells old.”
“It’s more than that. I know what old smells like,” he said sardonically.
Em and I, on the other hand, were more interested in the enigmatic note.
“What do you think it means?” I asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down.
“I’m not sure.” Em hesitated. “Blood usually signifies family, war, or death. But what about absence? Does it mean this page is absent from the book? Or did it warn your parents that they wouldn’t be present as you grew up?”
“Look at the last line. Did my parents discover something in Africa?”
“Or were you the discovery of witches?” Em suggested gently.
“The last line must be about Diana’s discovery of Ashmole 782,” Matthew chimed in, looking up from the chemical wedding.
“You believe that everything is about me and that manuscript,” I grumbled. “The note mentions the subject of your All Souls essay—fear and desire. Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“No stranger than the fact that the white queen in this picture is wearing my crest.” Matthew brought the illustration over to me.
“She’s the embodiment of quicksilver—the principle of volatility in alchemy,” I said.
“Quicksilver?” Matthew looked amused. “A metallic perpetual-motion machine?”
“You could say that.” I smiled, too, thinking of the ball of energy I’d given him.
“What about the red king?”
“He’s stable and grounded.” I frowned. “But he’s also supposed to be the sun, and he’s not usually depicted wearing black and red. Usually he’s just red.”
“So maybe the king isn’t me and the queen isn’t you.” He touched the white queen’s face delicately with his fingertip.
“Perhaps,” I said slowly, remembering a passage from the Matthew’s Aurora manuscript. “‘Attend to me, all people, and listen to me, all who inhabit the world: my beloved, who is red, has called to me. He sought, and found me. I am the flower of the field, a lily growing in the valley. I am the mother of true love, and of fear, and of understanding, and blessed hope.’”
“What is that?” Matthew touched my face now. “It sounds biblical, but the words aren’t quite right.”
“It’s one of the passages on the chemical wedding from the Aurora Consurgens .” Our eyes locked, held. When the air became heavy, I changed the subject. “What did my father mean when he said we’d have to travel far to figure out the picture’s significance?”
“The stamp came from Israel. Maybe Stephen meant we would have to return there.”
“There are a lot of alchemical manuscripts in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University. Most of them belonged to Isaac Newton.” Given Matthew’s history with the place, not to mention the Knights of Lazarus, it was not a city I was eager to visit.
“Israel didn’t count as ‘traveling far’ for your father,” said Sarah, sitting opposite. Em walked around the table and joined her.
“What did qualify?” Matthew picked up my mother’s letter and scanned the last page for further clues.
“The Australian outback. Wyoming. Mali. Those were his favorite places to timewalk.”
The word cut through me with the same intensity as “spellbound” had only a few days before. I knew that some witches could move between past, present, and future, but I’d never thought to ask whether anyone in my own family had the ability. It was rare—almost as rare as witchfire.
“Stephen Proctor could travel in time?” Matthew’s voice assumed the deliberate evenness it often did when magic was mentioned.
Sarah nodded. “Yes. Stephen went to the past or the future at least once a year, usually after the annual anthropologists’ convention in December.”
“There’s something on the back of Rebecca’s letter.” Em bent her neck to see underneath the page.
Matthew quickly flipped it over. “I dropped the page to get you outside before the witchwater broke. I didn’t see this. It’s not your mother’s handwriting,” he said, passing it to me.
The handwriting on the penciled note had elongated loops and spiky peaks. “Remember, Diana: ‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental