A Discovery Of Witches Part 5

"We get jumpy and weird. We hide in our labs and don't go to conferences for fear we might say something and help someone else have a breakthrough."

"You behave like wolves." I now knew a great deal about wolves. The possessive, guarded behaviors Chris described fit the Norwegian wolf nicely.

"Exactly." Chris laughed. "He hasn't bitten anyone or been caught howling at the moon?"

"Not that I'm aware of," I murmured. "Has Clairmont always been so reclusive?"

"I'm the wrong person to ask," Chris admitted. "He does have a medical degree, and must have seen patients, although he never had any reputation as a clinician. And the wolves liked him. But he hasn't been at any of the obvious conferences in the past three years." He paused. "Wait a minute, though, there was something a few years back."

"What?"

"He gave a paper-I can't remember the particulars-and a woman asked him a question. It was a smart question, but he was dismissive. She was persistent. He got irritated and then mad. A friend who was there said he'd never seen anybody go from courteous to furious so fast."

I was already typing, trying to find information about the controversy. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, huh? There's no sign of the ruckus online."

"I'm not surprised. Chemists don't air their dirty laundry in public. It hurts all of us at grant time. We don't want the bureaucrats thinking we're high-strung megalomaniacs. We leave that to the physicists."

"Does Clairmont get grants?"

"Oho. Yes. He's funded up to his eyeb.a.l.l.s. Don't you worry about Professor Clairmont's career. He may have a reputation for being contemptuous of women, but it hasn't dried up the money. His work is too good for that."

"Have you ever met him?" I asked, hoping to get Chris's judgment of Clairmont's character.

"No. You probably couldn't find more than a few dozen people who could claim they had. He doesn't teach. There are lots of stories, though-he doesn't like women, he's an intellectual sn.o.b, he doesn't answer his mail, he doesn't take on research students."

"Sounds like you think that's all nonsense."

"Not nonsense," Chris said thoughtfully. "I'm just not sure it matters, given that he might be the one to unlock the secrets of evolution or cure Parkinson's disease."

"You make him sound like a cross between Salk and Darwin."

"Not a bad a.n.a.logy, actually."

"He's that good?" I thought of Clairmont studying the Needham papers with ferocious concentration and suspected he was better than good.

"Yes." Chris dropped his voice. "If I were a betting man, I'd put down a hundred dollars that he'll win a n.o.bel before he dies."

Chris was a genius, but he didn't know that Matthew Clairmont was a vampire. There would be no n.o.bel-the vampire would see to that, to preserve his anonymity. n.o.bel Prize winners have their photos taken.

"It's a bet," I said with a laugh.

"You should start saving up, Diana, because you're going to lose this one." Chris chuckled.

He'd lost our last wager. I'd bet him fifty dollars that he'd be tenured before I was. His money was stuck inside the same frame that held his picture, taken the morning the MacArthur Foundation had called. In it, Chris was dragging his hands over his tight black curls, a sheepish smile lighting his dark face. His tenure had followed nine months later.

"Thanks, Chris. You've been a big help," I said sincerely. "You should get back to the kids. They've probably blown something up by now."

"Yeah, I should check on them. The fire alarms haven't gone off, which is a good sign." He hesitated. "'Fess up, Diana. You're not worried about saying the wrong thing if you see Matthew Clairmont at a c.o.c.ktail party. This is how you behave when you're working on a research problem. What is it about him that's hooked your imagination?"

Sometimes Chris seemed to suspect I was different. But there was no way to tell him the truth.

"I have a weakness for smart men."

He sighed. "Okay, don't tell me. You're a terrible liar, you know. But be careful. If he breaks your heart, I'll have to kick his a.s.s, and this is a busy semester for me."

"Matthew Clairmont isn't going to break my heart," I insisted. "He's a colleague-one with broad reading interests, that's all."

"For someone so smart, you really are clueless. I bet you ten dollars he asks you out before the week is over."

I laughed. "Are you ever going to learn? Ten dollars, then-or the equivalent in British sterling-when I win."

We said our good-byes. I still didn't know much about Matthew Clairmont-but I had a better sense of the questions that remained, most important among them being why someone working on a breakthrough in evolution would be interested in seventeenth-century alchemy.

I surfed the Internet until my eyes were too tired to continue. When the clocks struck midnight, I was surrounded by notes on wolves and genetics but was no closer to unraveling the mystery of Matthew Clairmont's interest in Ashmole 782.

Chapter 6.

The next morning was gray and much more typical of early autumn. All I wanted to do was coc.o.o.n myself in layers of sweaters and stay in my rooms.

One glance at the heavy weather convinced me not to return to the river. I set out for a run instead, waving at the night porter in the lodge, who gave me an incredulous look followed by an encouraging thumbs-up.

With each slap of my feet on the sidewalk, some stiffness left my body. By the time they reached the gravel paths of the University Parks, I was breathing deeply and felt relaxed and ready for a long day in the library-no matter how many creatures were gathered there.

When I got back, the porter stopped me. "Dr. Bishop?"

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry about turning your friend away last night, but it's college policy. Next time you're having guests, let us know and we'll send them straight up."

The clearheadedness from my run evaporated.

"Was it a man or a woman?" I asked sharply.

"A woman."

My shoulders floated down from around my ears.

"She seemed perfectly nice, and I always like Australians. They're friendly without being, you know . . . " The porter trailed off, but his meaning was clear. Australians were like Americans-but not so pushy. "We did call up to your rooms."

I frowned. I'd switched off the phone's ringer, because Sarah never calculated the time difference between Madison and Oxford correctly and was always calling in the middle of the night. That explained it.

"Thank you for letting me know. I'll be sure to tell you about any future visitors," I promised.

Back in my rooms, I flipped on the bathroom light and saw that the past two days had taken a toll. The circles that had appeared under my eyes yesterday had now blossomed into something resembling bruises. I checked my arm for bruises, too, and was surprised not to find any. The vampire's grip had been so strong that I was sure Clairmont had broken the blood vessels under the skin.

I showered and dressed in loose trousers and a turtleneck. Their unalleviated black accentuated my height and minimized my athletic build, but it also made me resemble a corpse, so I tied a soft periwinkle sweater around my shoulders. That made the circles under my eyes look bluer, but at least I no longer looked dead. My hair threatened to stand straight up from my head and crackled every time I moved. The only solution for it was to sc.r.a.pe it back into a messy knot at the nape of my neck.

Clairmont's trolley had been stuffed with ma.n.u.scripts, and I was resigned to seeing him in Duke Humfrey's Reading Room. I approached the call desk with shoulders squared.

Once again the supervisor and both attendants were flapping around like nervous birds. This time their activity was focused on the triangle between the call desk, the ma.n.u.script card catalogs, and the supervisor's office. They carried stacks of boxes and pushed carts loaded with ma.n.u.scripts under the watchful eyes of the gargoyles and into the first three bays of ancient desks.

"Thank you, Sean." Clairmont's deep, courteous voice floated from their depths.

The good news was that I would no longer have to share a desk with a vampire.

The bad news was that I couldn't enter or leave the library-or call a book or ma.n.u.script-without Clairmont's tracking my every move. And today he had backup.

A diminutive girl was stacking up papers and file folders in the second alcove. She was dressed in a long, baggy brown sweater that reached almost to her knees. When she turned, I was startled to see a full-grown adult. Her eyes were amber and black, and as cold as frostbite.

Even without their touch, her luminous, pale skin and unnaturally thick, glossy hair gave her away as a vampire. Snaky waves of it undulated around her face and over her shoulders. She took a step toward me, making no effort to disguise the swift, sure movements, and gave me a withering glance. This was clearly not where she wanted to be, and she blamed me.

"Miriam," Clairmont called softly, walking out into the center aisle. He stopped short, and a polite smile shaped his lips. "Dr. Bishop. Good morning." He raked his fingers through his hair, which only made it look more artfully tousled. I patted my own hair self-consciously and tucked a stray strand behind my ear.

"Good morning, Professor Clairmont. Back again, I see."

"Yes. But today I won't be joining you in the Selden End. They've been able to accommodate us here, where we won't disturb anyone."

The female vampire rapped a stack of papers sharply against the top of the desk.

Clairmont smiled. "May I introduce my research colleague, Dr. Miriam Shephard. Miriam, this is Dr. Diana Bishop."

"Dr. Bishop," Miriam said coolly, extending her hand in my direction. I took it and felt a shock at the contrast between her tiny, cold hand and my own larger, warmer one. I began to draw back, but her grip grew firmer, crus.h.i.+ng the bones together. When she finally let go, I had to resist the urge to shake out my hand.

"Dr. Shephard." The three of us stood awkwardly. What were you supposed to ask a vampire first thing in the morning? I fell back on human plat.i.tudes. "I should really get to work."

"Have a productive day," Clairmont said, his nod as cool as Miriam's greeting.

Mr. Johnson appeared at my elbow, my small stack of gray boxes waiting in his arms.

"We've got you in A4 today, Dr. Bishop," he said with a pleased puff of his cheeks. "I'll just carry these back for you." Clairmont's shoulders were so broad that I couldn't see around him to tell if there were bound ma.n.u.scripts on his desk. I stifled my curiosity and followed the reading-room supervisor to my familiar seat in the Selden End.

Even without Clairmont sitting across from me, I was acutely aware of him as I took out my pencils and turned on my computer. My back to the empty room, I picked up the first box, pulled out the leather-bound ma.n.u.script, and placed it in the cradle.

The familiar task of reading and taking notes soon absorbed my attention, and I finished with the first ma.n.u.script in less than two hours. My watch revealed that it was not yet eleven. There was still time for another before lunch.

The ma.n.u.script inside the next box was smaller than the last, but it contained interesting sketches of alchemical apparatus and snippets of chemical procedures that read like some unholy combination of Joy of Cooking Joy of Cooking and a poisoner's notebook. and a poisoner's notebook. "Take your pot of mercury and seethe it over a flame for three hours," "Take your pot of mercury and seethe it over a flame for three hours," began one set of instructions, began one set of instructions, "and when it has joined with the Philosophical Child take it and let it putrefy until the Black Crow carries it away to its death." "and when it has joined with the Philosophical Child take it and let it putrefy until the Black Crow carries it away to its death." My fingers flew over the keyboard, picking up momentum as the minutes ticked by. My fingers flew over the keyboard, picking up momentum as the minutes ticked by.

I had prepared myself to be stared at today by every creature imaginable. But when the clocks chimed one, I was still virtually alone in the Selden End. The only other reader was a graduate student wearing a red-, white-, and blue-striped Keble College scarf. He stared morosely at a stack of rare books without reading them and bit his nails with occasional loud clicks.

After filling out two new request slips and packing up my ma.n.u.scripts, I left my seat for lunch, satisfied with the morning's accomplishments. Gillian Chamberlain stared at me malevolently from an uncomfortable-looking seat near the ancient clock as I pa.s.sed by, the two female vampires from yesterday drove icicles into my skin, and the daemon from the music reference room had picked up two other daemons. The three of them were dismantling a microfilm reader, the parts scattered all around them and a roll of film unspooling, unnoticed, on the floor at their feet.

Clairmont and his vampire a.s.sistant were still stationed near the reading room's call desk. The vampire claimed that the creatures were flocking to me, not to him. But their behavior today suggested otherwise, I thought with triumph.

While I was returning my ma.n.u.scripts, Matthew Clairmont eyed me coldly. It took a considerable effort, but I refrained from acknowledging him.

"All done with these?" Sean asked.

"Yes. There are still two more at my desk. If I could have these as well, that would be great." I handed over the slips. "Do you want to join me for lunch?"

"Valerie just stepped out. I'm stuck here for a while, I'm afraid," he said with regret.

"Next time." Gripping my wallet, I turned to leave.

Clairmont's low voice stopped me in my tracks. "Miriam, it's lunchtime."

"I'm not hungry," she said in a clear, melodic soprano that contained a rumble of anger.

"The fresh air will improve your concentration." The note of command in Clairmont's voice was indisputable. Miriam sighed loudly, snapped her pencil onto her desk, and emerged from the shadows to follow me.

My usual meal consisted of a twenty-minute break in the nearby bookstore's second-floor cafe. I smiled at the thought of Miriam occupying herself during that time, trapped in Blackwell's where the tourists congregated to look at postcards, smack between the Oxford guidebooks and the true-crime section.

I secured a sandwich and some tea and squeezed into the farthest corner of the crowded room between a vaguely familiar member of the history faculty who was reading the paper and an undergraduate dividing his attention between a music player, a mobile phone, and a computer.

After finis.h.i.+ng my sandwich, I cupped the tea in my hands and glanced out the windows. I frowned. One of the unfamiliar daemons from Duke Humfrey's was lounging against the library gates and looking up at Black-well's windows.

Two nudges pressed against my cheekbones, as gentle and fleeting as a kiss. I looked up into the face of another daemon. She was beautiful, with arresting, contradictory features-her mouth too wide for her delicate face, her chocolate brown eyes too close together given their enormous size, her hair too fair for skin the color of honey.

"Dr. Bishop?" The woman's Australian accent sent cold fingers moving around the base of my spine.

"Yes," I whispered, glancing at the stairs. Miriam's dark head failed to emerge from below. "I'm Diana Bishop."

She smiled. "I'm Agatha Wilson. And your friend downstairs doesn't know I'm here."

It was an incongruously old-fas.h.i.+oned name for someone who was only about ten years older than I was, and far more stylish. Her name was familiar, though, and I dimly remembered seeing it in a fas.h.i.+on magazine.

"May I sit down?" she asked, gesturing at the seat just vacated by the historian.

"Of course," I murmured.

On Monday I'd met a vampire. On Tuesday a witch tried to worm his way into my head. Wednesday, it would appear, was daemon day.

Even though they'd followed me around college, I knew even less about daemons than I did about vampires. Few seemed to understand the creatures, and Sarah had never been able to answer my questions about them. Based on her accounts, daemons const.i.tuted a criminal undercla.s.s. Their superabundance of cleverness and creativity led them to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill, because they felt they could get away with it. Even more troublesome, as far as Sarah was concerned, were the conditions of their birth. There was no telling where or when a daemon would crop up, since they were typically born to human parents. To my aunt this only compounded their already marginal position in the hierarchy of beings. She valued a witch's family traditions and bloodlines, and she didn't approve of daemonic unpredictability.

Agatha Wilson was content to sit next to me quietly at first, watching me hold my tea. Then she started to talk in a bewildering swirl of words. Sarah always said that conversations with daemons were impossible, because they began in the middle.

"So much energy is bound to attract us," she said matter-of-factly, as if I'd asked her a question. "The witches were in Oxford for Mabon, and chattering as if the world weren't full of vampires who hear everything everything." She fell silent. "We weren't sure we'd ever see it again."

"See what?" I said softly.

"The book," she confided in a low voice.

"The book," I repeated, my voice flat.