A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [98]
“So you earn everything twice over. First you earn it by not simply taking it, and then you earn it again through work and effort.” He laughed bitterly. “The advantages of being an otherworldly creature don’t amount to much, do they?”
Matthew suggested we sit by his fireless fireplace. I lounged on the sofa, and he carried some nutty biscuits over to the table by me, before disappearing into the kitchen once more. When he returned, he was carrying a small tray with the ancient black bottle on it—the cork now pulled—and two glasses of amber-colored liquid. He handed one to me.
“Close your eyes and tell me what you smell,” he instructed in his Oxford don’s voice. My lids dropped obediently. The wine seemed at once old and vibrant. It smelled of flowers and nuts and candied lemons and of some other, long-past world that I had—until now—been able only to read about and imagine.
“It smells like the past. But not the dead past. It’s so alive.”
“Open your eyes and take a sip.”
As the sweet, bright liquid went down my throat, something ancient and powerful entered my bloodstream. This must be what vampire blood tastes like. I kept my thoughts to myself.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?” I asked around the flavors in my mouth.
“Malmsey,” he replied with a grin. “Old, old malmsey.”
“How old?” I said suspiciously. “As old as you are?”
He laughed. “No. You don’t want to drink anything as old as I am. It’s from 1795, from grapes grown on the island of Madeira. It was quite popular once, but nobody pays much attention to it now.”
“Good,” I said with greedy satisfaction. “All the more for me.” He laughed again and sat easily in one of his Morris chairs.
We talked about his time at All Souls, about Hamish—the other Prize Fellow, it turned out—and their adventures in Oxford. I laughed at his stories of dining in hall and how he’d bolted to Woodstock after every meal to clean the taste of overcooked beef from his mouth.
“You look tired,” he finally said, standing after another glass of malmsey and another hour of conversation.
“I am tired.” Despite my fatigue, there was something I needed to tell him before he took me home. I put my glass down carefully. “I’ve made a decision, Matthew. On Monday I’ll be recalling Ashmole 782.”
The vampire sat down abruptly.
“I don’t know how I broke the spell the first time, but I’ll try to do it again. Knox doesn’t have much faith that I’ll succeed.” My mouth tightened. “What does he know? He hasn’t been able to break the spell once. And you might be able to see the words in the magical palimpsest that lie under the images.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know what you did to break the spell?” Matthew’s forehead creased with confusion. “What words did you use? What powers did you call upon?”
“I broke the spell without realizing it,” I explained.
“Christ, Diana.” He shot to his feet again. “Does Knox know that you didn’t use witchcraft?”
“If he knows, I didn’t tell him.” I shrugged. “Besides, what does it matter?”
“It matters because if you didn’t break the enchantment, then you met its conditions. Right now the creatures are waiting to observe whatever counterspell you used, copy it if they can, and get Ashmole 782 themselves. When your fellow witches discover that the spell opened for you of its own accord, they won’t be so patient and well behaved.”
Gillian’s angry face swam before my eyes, accompanied by a vivid recollection of the lengths she reported witches had gone to in order to pry secrets from my parents. I brushed the thoughts aside, my stomach rolling, and focused on the flaws in Matthew’s argument.
“The spell was constructed more than a century before I was born. That’s impossible.”
“Just because something seems impossible doesn’t make it untrue,” he said grimly. “Newton knew that. There’s no telling what Knox will do when he understands your relationship to the spell.”
“I’m in danger whether I recall the manuscript or not,” I pointed out. “Knox isn