coming from, then?” I asked, looking around. “Did someone turn on the radio?”
“The only thing in my briefcase is this.” Hubbard released its two brass clasps and withdrew something.
The chattering grew louder as a jolt of power entered my body. Every sense I had was heightened, and the threads that bound the world chimed in sudden agitation, coiling and twisting in the space between me and the sheet of vellum that Andrew Hubbard held in his fingers. My blood responded to the faint vestiges of magic that clung to this solitary page from the Book of Life, and my wrists burned as a faint, familiar scent of must and age filled the room.
Hubbard turned the page so that it faced me, but I already knew what I would see there: two alchemical dragons locked together, the blood from their wounds falling into a basin from which naked, pale figures rose. It depicted the stage in the alchemical process after the chemical marriage of the moon queen and the sun king: conceptio, when a new and powerful substance sprang forth from the union of opposites—male and female, light and dark, sun and moon.
After spending weeks in the Beinecke looking for Ashmole 782’s missing pages, I’d unexpectedly encountered one of them in my own dining room.
“Edward Kelley sent it to me the autumn after you left. He told me not to let it out of my sight.”
Hubbard slid the page toward me.
We had only caught a glimpse of this illumination in Rudolf’s palace. Later Matthew and I had speculated that what we thought were two dragons might actually be a firedrake and an ouroboros. One of the alchemical dragons was indeed a firedrake, with two legs and wings, and the other was a snake with its tail in its mouth. The ouroboros at my wrist writhed in recognition, its colors shining with possibility. The image was mesmerizing, and now that I had time to study it properly, small things struck me: the dragons’ rapt expressions as they gazed into each other’s eyes, the look of wonder on their progeny’s faces as they emerged from the basin where they’d been born, the striking balance between two such powerful creatures.
“Jack made sure Edward’s picture was safe no matter what. Plague, fire, war—the boy never let anything touch it. He claimed it belonged to you, Mistress Roydon,” Hubbard said, interrupting my reveries.
“To me?” I touched the corner of the vellum, and one of the twins gave a strong kick. “No. It belongs to all of us.”
“And yet you have some kind of special connection to it. You’re the only one who has ever heard it speak.” Andrew said. “Long ago, a witch in my care said he thought it came from the witches’ first spell book. But an old vampire passing through London said it was a page from the Book of Life. I pray to God that neither tale is true.”
“What do you know about the Book of Life?” Matthew’s voice was a peal of thunder.
“I know that Benjamin wants it,” Hubbard said. “He told Jack as much. But that wasn’t the first time my sire mentioned the book. Benjamin looked for it in Oxford long ago—before he made me a vampire.”
That meant Benjamin had been looking for the Book of Life since before the middle of the fourteenth century—far longer than Matthew had been interested in it.
“My sire thought he might find it in the library of an Oxford sorcerer. Benjamin took the witch a gift in exchange for the book: a brass head that supposedly spoke oracles.” Hubbard’s face filled with sadness. “It is always a pity to see such a wise man taken in by vanity and superstition. ‘Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves any gods of cast metal,’ sayeth the Lord.”
Gerbert of Aurillac had reputedly owned just such a miraculous device. I had thought Peter Knox was the member of the Congregation who was most interested in Ashmole 782. Was it possible that Gerbert had been in league with Benjamin all these years and it was he who sought out Peter Knox’s help?
“The witch in Oxford took the brass head but wouldn’t relinquish the book,” Hubbard continued.
“Decades later my sire still cursed him for his duplicity. I never did discover the witch’s name.”
“I believe it was Roger Bacon—an alchemist and a philosopher as well as a witch.” Matthew looked at me. Bacon once owned the Book of Life, and had called it the “true secret of secrets.”