seen in friends’ pregnancy scans, these revealed detailed images of faces with crinkled brows, thumbs rammed into mouths, perfectly bowed lips. My finger reached out, and I touched Baby B’s nose.
Cool hands slid around me from behind, and a tall, muscular body provided a strong pillar for me to rest against. Matthew pressed lightly on a spot a few inches above my pubic bone.
“B’s nose is just there in that picture,” he said softly. His other hand rested a bit higher on the swell of my belly. “Baby A was here.”
We stood silently as the chain that had always joined me to Matthew extended to accommodate these two bright, fragile links. For months I had known that Matthew’s children—our children—were growing inside me. But I had not felt it. Everything was different now that I’d seen their faces, crumpled in concentration as they did the hard work of becoming.
“What are you thinking?” Matthew asked, curious about my extended silence.
“I’m not thinking. I’m feeling.” And what I was feeling was impossible to describe.
His laugh was soft, as though he didn’t want to disturb the babies’ sleep.
“They’re both all right,” I assured myself. “Normal. Perfect.”
“They are perfectly healthy. But none of our children will ever be normal. And thank God for that.”
He kissed me. “What’s on your schedule for today?”
“More work at the library.” My initial, magical lead that had promised to reveal the fate of at least one of the Book of Life’s missing pages had turned into weeks of hard, scholarly slogging. Lucy and I had been working steadily to discover just how the Voynich manuscript came into Athanasius Kircher’s hands and later into Yale’s possession, hoping to catch a trace of the mysterious tree image that had remained superimposed on the Voynich for a few precious moments. We’d set up camp in the same small private room where I’d worked my spell so that we could talk without disturbing the growing number of students and faculty using the Beinecke’s adjacent reading room. There we’d pored over library lists and indexes of Kircher’s correspondence, and we’d written dozens of letters to various experts in the United States and abroad—with no concrete results.
“You’re remembering what the doctor said about taking breaks?” Matthew asked. With the exception of the ultrasound, our trip to the doctor’s office had been sobering. She had drummed into me the dangers of premature labor and preeclampsia, the necessity of staying hydrated, my body’s additional need for rest.
“My blood pressure is fine.” This, I understood, was one of the biggest risks: that through a combination of dehydration, fatigue, and stress, my blood pressure would suddenly spike.
“I know.” Monitoring my blood pressure was my vampire husband’s responsibility, and Matthew took it seriously. “But it won’t remain that way if you push yourself.”
“This is my twenty-fifth week of pregnancy, Matthew. It’s almost October.”
“I know that, too.”
After October 1 the doctor was grounding me. If we remained in New Haven where we could continue working, the only way to get to the Bodleian Library would be by some combination of boat, plane, and automobile. Even now I was restricted to flights of no more than three hours.
“We can still get you to Oxford by plane.” Matthew knew of my concerns. “It will have to stop in Montreal, and then Newfoundland, Iceland, and Ireland, but if you must get to London, we can manage it.” His expression suggested that he and I might have different ideas about what circumstances would justify my crossing the Atlantic in this hopscotch fashion. “Of course, if you’d prefer we can go to Europe now.”
“Let’s not borrow trouble.” I pulled away from him. “Tell me about your day.”
“Chris and Miriam think they have a new approach to understanding the blood-rage gene,” he said.
“They’re planning to trawl through my genome using one of Marcus’s theories about noncoding DNA.
Their current hypothesis is that it might contain triggers that control how and to what extent blood rage manifests in a given individual.”
“This is Marcus’s junk DNA—the ninety-eight percent of the genome that doesn’t code proteins, right?” I took a bottle of water out of the fridge and popped the cap off to show my commitment to hydration.
“That’s right. I’m still resistant to the notion, but the evidence they’re pulling together is convincing.” Matthew looked wry. “I really am an old Mendelian fossil, just as Chris said.”
“Yes, but you’re my Mendelian fossil,” I said. Matthew laughed. “And if Marcus’s hypothesis is correct, what will that mean in terms of finding a