A Discovery of Witches (93 page)

The keeping-room doors opened with a sharp bang. One of the floorboards near the fireplace sprang up, revealing a small, black-bound book and a creamy envelope. It was the brightest thing in the room, and it gleamed in the moonlight.

Sarah muffled a cry and held out her hand. The cream square flew easily into it, landed with a slight smack, and flipped over. A single word was written on it.

“Sarah.”

She touched the letters lightly and saw Matthew’s long white fingers. She tore at the paper, her heart beating fast.

“Sarah,”
it said. “
Don’t worry. We made it.”

Her heart rate calmed.

Sarah put the single sheet of paper on her mother’s rocking chair and gestured for the book. Once the house delivered it, the floorboard returned to its normal resting place with a groan of old wood and the shriek of old nails.

She flipped to the first page.
The Shadow of Night, Containing Two Poeticall Hymnes devised by G. C. gent. 1594.
The book smelled old but not unpleasant, like incense in a dusty cathedral.

Just like Matthew,
Sarah thought with a smile.

A slip of paper stuck out of the top. It led her to the dedication page.
“To my deare and most worthy friend Matthew Roydon.”
Sarah peered more closely and saw a tiny, faded drawing of a hand with a ruffled cuff pointing imperiously to the name, with the number “
29”
written underneath in ancient brown ink.

She turned obediently to page twenty-nine, struggling through tears as she read the underlined passage:

The words conjured up the image of Diana—clear, bright, unbidden—her face framed with gauzy wings and her throat thickly encircled with silver and diamonds. A single tear-shaped ruby quivered on her skin like a drop of blood, nestled into the notch between her collarbones.

In the stillroom, as the sun was rising, he had promised to find some way to let her know Diana was safe.

“Thank you, Matthew.” Sarah kissed the book and the note and threw them into the cavernous fireplace. She said the words to conjure a white-hot fire. The paper caught quickly, and the book’s edges began to curl.

Sarah watched the fire burn for a few moments. Then she walked out the front door, leaving it unlocked, and didn’t look back.

Once the door closed, a worn silver coffin shot down the chimney and landed on the burning paper. Two gobbets of blood and mercury, released from the hollow chambers inside the ampulla by the heat of the fire, chased each other around the surface of the book before falling into the grate. There they seeped into the soft old mortar of the fireplace and traveled into the heart of the house. When they reached it, the house sighed with relief and released a forgotten, forbidden scent.

Sarah drank in the cool night air as she climbed into the RV. Her senses were not sharp enough to catch the cinnamon and blackthorn, honeysuckle and chamomile dancing in the air.

“Okay?” Em asked, her voice serene.

Sarah leaned across the cat carrier that held Tabitha and squeezed Em’s knee. “Just fine.”

Faye turned the key in the ignition and pulled down the driveway and onto the county road that would take them to the interstate, chattering about where they could stop for breakfast.

The four witches were too far away to perceive the shift in atmosphere around the house as hundreds of night creatures detected the unusual aroma of commingled vampire and witch, or to see the pale green smudges of the two ghosts in the keeping-room window.

Bridget Bishop and Diana’s grandmother watched the vehicle’s departure.

What will we do now?
Diana’s grandmother asked.

What we’ve always done, Joanna,
Bridget replied.
Remember the past—and await the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My greatest debt is to the friends and family who read this book, chapter by chapter, as it was written: Cara, Karen, Lisa, Margaret, and my mom, Olive. Peg and Lynn, as always, provided excellent meals, warm companionship, and wise counsel. And I am especially appreciative of the editorial work that Lisa Halttunen did to prepare the manuscript for submission.

Colleagues generously lent me their expertise as I wandered far from my own area of specialization. Philippa Levine, Andrés Reséndez, Vanessa Schwartz, and Patrick Wyman steered me in the right direction whenever I took a misstep. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.

I will always be grateful that Sam Stoloff of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency took the news that I had written a novel, and not another work of history, with grace and good humor. He also read the early drafts with a keen eye. Additional thanks to the agency’s Ellen Geiger, for her inspired choice of dinner companions!

The team at Viking has become a second family to me. My editor, Car-ole DeSanti, represents what every author hopes for when they are writing a book: someone who will not only appreciate what you have put on the page but can envision what story those words could tell if they were tweaked just so. Maureen Sugden, copy editor extraordinaire, polished the book in record time. Thank you also to Clare Ferraro, Leigh Butler, Hal Fessenden, and the rights group; Nancy Sheppard, Carolyn Coleburn, and the marketing and sales team; Victoria Klose, Christopher Russell, and everyone who has helped transform this work from a stack of paper into a book.

Because this is a book
about
books, I consulted a substantial number of texts as I wrote. Curious readers can find some of them by consulting the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible, Marie-Louise von Franz’s critical edition and translation of
Aurora Consurgens
(Pantheon Books, 1966), and Paul Eugene Memmo’s translation of Giordano Bruno’s
Heroic Frenzies
(University of North Carolina Press, 1964). Those readers who do go exploring should know that the translations here are my own and therefore have their idiosyncrasies. Anyone who wants to delve further into the mind of Charles Darwin has the ideal place to start in Janet Browne’s
Charles Darwin: A Biography
(2 vols., Alfred Knopf, 1995 and 2002). And for a lucid introduction to mtDNA and its application to the problems of human history consult Brian Sykes,
The Seven Daughters of Eve
(W. W. Norton, 2001).