A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [297]
“Where’s Hamish?” Matthew asked.
“In my office, using the printer.” Sarah gave him a long look and returned to her pan.
Marcus left his Scrabble game and came to the kitchen to take a walk with his father. He grabbed a handful of nuts as he left, sniffing the muffins with a groan of frustrated desire.
“What’s going on?” I asked quietly.
“Hamish is being a lawyer,” Sophie replied, spreading a thick layer of butter on top of a muffin. “He says there are papers to sign.”
Hamish called us into the dining room in the late morning. We straggled in carrying wineglasses and mugs. He looked as though he hadn’t slept. Neat stacks of paper were arranged across the table’s expanse, along with sticks of black wax and two seals belonging to the Knights of Lazarus—one small, one large. My heart hit my stomach and bounced back into my throat.
“Should we sit?” Em asked. She’d brought in a fresh pot of coffee and topped off Hamish’s mug.
“Thank you, Em,” Hamish said gratefully. Two empty chairs sat officiously at the head of the table. He gestured Matthew and me into them and picked up the first stack of papers. “Yesterday afternoon we went over a number of practical issues related to the situation in which we now find ourselves.”
My heart sped up, and I eyed the seals again.
“A little less lawyerly, Hamish, if you please,” Matthew said, his hand tightening on my back. Hamish glowered at him and continued.
“Diana and Matthew will timewalk, as planned, on Halloween. Ignore everything else Matthew told you to do.” Hamish took an obvious pleasure in delivering this part of his message. “We’ve agreed that it would be best if everyone . . . disappeared for a little while. As of this moment, your old lives are on hold.”
Hamish put a document in front of me. “This is a power of attorney, Diana. It authorizes me—or whoever occupies the position of seneschal—to act legally on your behalf.”
The power of attorney gave the abstract idea of timewalking a new sense of finality. Matthew fished a pen from his pocket.
“Here,” he said, placing the pen before me.
The pen’s nib wasn’t used to the angle and pressure of my hand, and it scratched while I put my signature on the line. When I was finished, Matthew took it and dropped a warm black blob on the bottom, then reached for his personal seal and pressed it into the wax.
Hamish picked up the next stack. “These letters are for you to sign, too. One informs your conference organizers that you cannot speak in November. The other requests a medical leave for next year. Your physician—one Dr. Marcus Whitmore—has written in support. In the event you haven’t returned by April, I’ll send your request to Yale.”
I read the letters carefully and signed with a shaking hand, relinquishing my life in the twenty-first century.
Hamish braced his hands against the edge of the table. Clearly he was building up to something. “There is no telling when Matthew and Diana will be back with us.” He didn’t use the word “if,” but it hovered in the room nonetheless. “Whenever any member of the firm or of the de Clermont family is preparing to take a long journey or drop out of sight for a while, it’s my job to make sure their affairs are in order. Diana, you have no will.”
“No.” My mind was entirely blank. “But I don’t have any assets—not even a car.”
Hamish straightened. “That’s not entirely true, is it, Matthew?”
“Give it to me,” Matthew said reluctantly. Hamish handed him a thick document. “This was drawn up when I was last in Oxford.”
“Before La Pierre,” I said, not touching the pages.
Matthew nodded. “Essentially, it’s our marriage agreement. It irrevocably settles a third of my personal assets on you. Even if you were to leave me, these assets would be yours.”
It was dated before he’d come home—before we were mated for life by vampire custom.
“I’ll never leave you, and I don’t want this.”
“You don’t even know what this is,” Matthew said, putting the pages in front of me.
There was too much to absorb. Staggering