“Could you give us a minute?” I asked Chris and Beaker. They moved off to the side, Beaker grinning from ear to ear and Chris pinching the bridge of his nose. Matthew joined us.
“You look surprisingly well for someone who’s been to the sixteenth century and back, Matthew.
And Diana’s obviously enceinte,” Miriam said, using the French word for “pregnant.”
“Thanks. Are you at Marcus’s place?” Matthew asked.
“That monstrosity on Orange Street? No chance. It’s a convenient location, but it gives me the creeps.” Miriam shivered. “Too much mahogany.”
“You’re welcome to stay with us on Court Street,” I offered. “There’s a spare bedroom on the third floor. You’d have privacy.”
“Thanks, but I’m around the corner. At Gallowglass’s condo,” Miriam replied.
“What condo?” Matthew frowned.
“The one he bought on Wooster Square. Some converted church. It’s very nice—a bit too Danish in decor, but far preferable to Marcus’s dark-and-gloomy period.” Miriam looked at Matthew sharply.
“Gallowglass did tell you he was coming with me?”
“No, he did not.” Matthew ran his fingers through his hair.
I knew just how my husband felt: The de Clermonts had switched into overprotective mode. Only now they weren’t protecting just me. They were protecting Matthew as well.
16
“Bad news, I’m afraid.” Lucy Meriweather’s lips twisted in a sympathetic grimace. She was one of the Beinecke librarians, and she’d helped me for years, both with my own research and on the occasions when I brought my students to the library to use the rare books there. “If you want to look at Manuscript 408, you’ll have to go into a private room with a curator. And there’s a limit of thirty minutes. They won’t let you sit in the reading room with it.”
“Thirty minutes? With a curator?” I was stunned by the regulations, having spent the last ten months with Matthew, who never paid any attention to such restrictions. “I’m a Yale professor. Why does a curator have to baby-sit me?”
“Those are the rules for everybody—even our own faculty. The whole thing is online,” Lucy reminded me.
But a computer image, no matter how high the resolution, wasn’t going to give me the information I needed. I’d last seen the Voynich manuscript—now Beinecke Library MS 408—in 1591, when Matthew had carried the book from Dr. Dee’s library to the court of Emperor Rudolf in Prague, hoping that we could swap it for the Book of Life. Now I hoped it would shed light on what Edward Kelley might have done with those missing pages.
I’d been searching for clues to their whereabouts since we went to Madison. One missing page had an image of two scaly, long-tailed creatures bleeding into a round vessel. The other image was a splendid rendering of a tree, its branches bearing an impossible combination of flowers, fruit, and leaves and its trunk made up of writhing human shapes. I’d hoped that locating the two pages would be fairly straightforward in the age of Internet searches and digitized images. So far that had not been the case.
“Maybe if you could explain why you need to see the physical book . . .” Lucy trailed off.
But how could I tell Lucy I needed the book so I could use magic on it?
This was the Beinecke Library, for heaven’s sake.
If anyone found out, it would ruin my career.
“I’ll look at the Voynich tomorrow.” Hopefully, I would have another plan by then, since I couldn’t very well haul out my mother’s book of shadows and devise new spells in front of a curator. Juggling my witch self and my scholar self was proving difficult. “Did the other books I requested arrive?”
“They did.” Lucy’s eyebrows lifted when she slid the collection of medieval magical texts across the desk, along with several early printed books. “Changing your research focus?”
In an effort to be prepared for any magical eventuality when finally it came time to recall Ashmole 782 and reunite it with its missing pages, I had called up books that might inspire my efforts to weave new higher-magic spells. Though my mother’s spell book was a valuable resource, I knew from my own experience how far modern witches had fallen when compared to the witches of the past.
“Alchemy and magic aren’t completely distinct,” I told Lucy defensively. Sarah and Em had tried to get me to see that for years. At last I believed them.
Once I was settled in the reading room, the magical manuscripts were as intriguing as I’d hoped, with sigils that reminded me of weavers’ knots and gramarye that was precise and potent.