The Book of Life (53 page)

“I understand, Phoebe.” I tried to sound sympathetic. “Would it help to know that there are other, far larger and more important works by Holbein in the parlor?”

“And upstairs. The whole sainted family is in one of the attics.” Ysabeau pointed heavenward.

“Thomas More was an arrogant young man, and he did not grow more humble with age. Matthew did not seem to mind, but Thomas and Philippe nearly came to blows on several occasions. If his daughter drowns in the lavatory, it will serve him right.”

Amira began to giggle. After a shocked look, Fernando joined in. Soon we were all laughing, even Phoebe.

“What is all this noise? What has happened now?” Marthe eyed us suspiciously from the door.

“Phoebe is adjusting to being a de Clermont,” I said, wiping at my eyes.

“Bonne chance,”
Marthe said. This only made us laugh harder.

It was a welcome reminder that, different though we might be, we were a family of sorts—no stranger or more idiosyncratic than thousands that had come before us.

“And these pages you’ve brought—are they from Matthew’s collections as well?” Amira said, picking up the conversation where we’d abandoned it.

“No. One of them was given to my parents, and the other was in the hands of Matthew’s grandson, Andrew Hubbard.”

“Hmm. So much fear.” Amira’s eyes lost focus. She was a witch with significant insight and empathic powers.

“Amira?” I looked at her closely.

“Blood and fear.” She shuddered, not seeming to hear me. “It’s in the parchment itself, not just the words.”

“Should I stop her?” I asked Sarah. In most situations it was best to let a witch’s second sight play itself out, but Amira had slipped too quickly into her vision of another time and place. A witch might wander so far into a thicket of images and feelings that she couldn’t find her way out of them. “Absolutely not,” Sarah said. “There are two of us to help her if she gets lost.”

“A young woman—a mother. She was killed in front of her children,” Amira murmured. My stomach flipped. “Their father was already dead. When the witches brought her husband’s body to her, they dropped it at her feet and made her look at what they had done to him. It was she who first cursed the book. So much knowledge, lost forever.” Amira’s eyes drifted closed. When they opened again, they were shining with unshed tears. “This parchment was made from the skin that stretched over her ribs.”

I knew that the Book of Life had dead creatures in it, but I never imagined I would know anything more about them than whatever their DNA was capable of revealing. I bolted for the door, stomach heaving. Corra flapped her wings in agitation, turning this way and that to stabilize her position, but there was little room for her to maneuver thanks to the growing presence of the twins.

“Shh. That will not be your fate. I promise you,” Ysabeau said, catching me in her arms. She was cool and solid, her strength evident in spite of her graceful build.

“Am I doing the right thing to try to mend this broken book?” I asked once the roiling in my guts had stopped. “And to do it without Matthew?”

“Right or wrong, it must be done.” Ysabeau smoothed back my hair, which had tumbled forward, obscuring my face. “Call him, Diana. He would not want you to suffer like this.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Matthew has his job to do. I have mine.”

“Let us finish it then,” Ysabeau said.

Chipping Weston was the type of picturesque English village where novelists liked to set murder mysteries. It looked like a postcard or a film set, but it was home to several hundred people who lived in thatched houses spread out over a handful of narrow lanes. The village green still boasted stocks for punishing its citizens found guilty of some wrongdoing, and there were two pubs so that even if you had a falling-out with half your neighbors, you’d still have a place to go where you could have your evening pint. The Manor House was not difficult to find.

“The gates are open.” Gallowglass cracked his knuckles.

“What is your plan, Gallowglass? Running at the front door and battering it down with your bare hands?” I climbed out of Leonard’s car. “Come on, Phoebe. Let’s go ring the bell.”

Gallowglass was behind us as we walked straight through the open front gates and skirted the round stone planter that I suspected had been a fountain before it was filled in with soil. Standing in the middle were two box trees clipped to resemble dachshunds.

“How extraordinary,” Phoebe murmured, eyeing the green sculptures.

The door to the manor was set in the middle of a bank of low windows. There was no bell, but an iron knocker—also shaped like a dachshund—had been inexpertly affixed to the stout Elizabethan panels. Before Phoebe could give me a lecture about the preservation of old houses, I lifted the dog and rapped sharply.

Silence.

I rapped again, putting a bit more weight into it.

“We are standing in plain view of the road,” Gallowglass growled. “That’s the sorriest excuse for a wall I’ve ever seen. A child could step over it.”

“Not everybody can have a moat,” I said. “I hardly think Benjamin has ever heard of Chipping Weston, never mind followed us here.”

Gallowglass was unconvinced and continued to look around like an anxious owl.

I was about to rap again when the door was flung open. A man wearing goggles and carrying a parachute stood in the entrance. Dogs swarmed around his feet, wriggling and barking.

“Whenever have you been?” The stranger engulfed me in a hug while I tried to sort out what his strange question meant. The dogs leaped and frolicked, excited to meet me now that their master had signaled his approval. He let me go and lifted his goggles, his nudging stare feeling like a buss of welcome. “You’re a daemon,” I said unnecessarily.

“And you’re a witch.” With one green eye and one blue, he studied Gallowglass. “And he’s a vampire. Not the same one you had with you before, but still big enough to replace the lightbulbs.”

“I don’t do lightbulbs,” Gallowglass said.

“Wait. I know you,” I said, sifting through the faces in my memory. This was one of the daemons I’d seen in the Bodleian last year when I’d first encountered Ashmole 782. He liked lattes and taking apart microfilm readers. He always wore earbuds, even when they weren’t attached to anything.

“Timothy?”

“The same.” Timothy turned his eyes to me and cocked his fingers and thumbs so they looked like six-shooters. He was, I noticed, still wearing mismatched cowboy boots, but this time one was green and the other blue—to match his eyes, one presumed. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Told you, babe: You’re the one.”

“Are you T. J. Weston?” Phoebe asked, trying to make her voice heard above the din of yelping, wriggling dogs.

Timothy stuffed his fingers in his ears and mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”

“Oy!” Gallowglass shouted. “Shut your gobs, little yappers.”

The barking stopped instantly. The dogs sat, jaws open and tongues lolling, and looked at Gallowglass adoringly. Timothy removed a finger from one of his ears.

“Nice,” the daemon said with a low whistle of appreciation. The dogs immediately started barking again.

Gallowglass bundled us all inside, muttering darkly about sight lines and defensive positions and possible hearing damage to Apple and Bean. Peace was achieved once he got down on the floor in front of the fireplace and let the dogs scramble all over him, licking and burrowing as if their pack’s alpha had been returned to them after a long absence.

“What are their names?” Phoebe inquired, trying to count the number of tails in the squirming mound.

“Hansel and Gretel, obviously.” Timothy looked at Phoebe as though she were hopeless.

“And the other four?” Phoebe asked.

“Oscar. Molly. Rusty. And Puddles.” Timothy pointed to each dog in turn.

“He likes to play outside in the rain?”

“No,” Timothy replied. “She likes to piddle on the floor. Her name was Penelope, but everybody in the village calls her Puddles now.”

A graceful segue from this subject to the Book of Life was impossible, so I plunged forward. “Did you buy a page from an illuminated manuscript that has a tree on it?”

“Yep.” Timothy blinked.

“Would you be willing to sell it to me?” There was no point in being coy.

“Nope.”

“We’re prepared to pay handsomely for it.” Phoebe might not like the de Clermonts’ casual indifference to where pictures were hung, but she was beginning to see the benefits of their purchasing power.

“It’s not for sale.” Timothy ruffled the ears of one of the dogs who then returned to Gallowglass and began to gnaw on the toe of his boot.

“Can I see it?” Perhaps Timothy would let me borrow it, I thought.

“Sure.” Timothy divested himself of the parachute, which he had been wearing like a cape, and strode out of the room. We scrambled to keep up.

He led us through several rooms that had clearly been designed for different purposes from the ones they were now used for. A dining room had a battered drum kit set up in the center with
DEREK AND THE DERANGERS
painted on the bass-drum head, and another room looked like an electronics graveyard except for the chintz sofas and beribboned wallpaper.

“It’s in there. Somewhere,” Timothy said, gesturing at the next room. “Holy Mother of God,” Gallowglass said, astonished.

“There” was the old library. “Somewhere” covered a multitude of possible hiding places, including unopened shipping crates and mail, cardboard cartons full of sheet music going back to the 1920s, and stacks and stacks of old newspapers. There was a large collection of clock faces of all sizes, descriptions, and vintages, too.

And there were manuscripts. Thousands of manuscripts.

“I think it’s in a blue folder,” Timothy said, scratching his chin. He had obviously started shaving at some point earlier in the day but only partially completed the task, leaving two grizzled patches.

“How long have you been buying old books?” I asked, picking up the first one that came to hand. It was an eighteenth-century student science notebook, German, and of no particular value except to a scholar of Enlightenment education.

“Since I was thirteen. That’s when my gran died and left me this place. My mom left when I was five, and my dad, Derek, died of an accidental overdose when I turned nine, so it was just me and Gran after that.” Timothy looked around the room fondly. “I’ve been restoring it ever since. Do you want to see my paint chips for the gallery upstairs?”

“Maybe later,” I said.

“Okay.” His face fell.

“Why do manuscripts interest you?” When trying to get answers from daemons and undergraduates, it was best to ask genuinely open-ended questions.

“They’re like the house—they remind me of something I shouldn’t forget,” Timothy said, as though that explained everything.

“With any luck one of them will remind him where he put the page from your book,” Gallowglass said under his breath. “If not, it’s going to take us weeks to go through all this rubbish.”

We didn’t have weeks. I wanted Ashmole 782 out of the Bodleian and stitched back together so that Matthew could come home. Without the Book of Life, we were vulnerable to the Congregation, Benjamin, and whatever private ambitions Knox harbored. Once it was safely in our possession, they would all have to deal with us on our terms—scion or no scion. I pushed up my sleeves.

“Would it be all right with you, Timothy, if I used magic in your library?” It seemed polite to ask.

“Will it be loud?” Timothy asked. “The dogs don’t like noise.”

“No,” I said, considering my options. “I think it will be completely silent.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay, then,” he said, relieved. He put his goggles back on for additional security.

“More magic, Auntie?” Gallowglass’s eyebrows lowered. “You’ve been using an awful lot of it lately.”

“Wait until tomorrow,” I murmured. If I got all three missing pages, I was going to the Bodleian.

Then it was gloves-off time.

A flurry of papers rose from the floor.

“You’ve started already?” Gallowglass said, alarmed.

“No,” I said.

“Then what’s causing the ruckus?” Gallowglass moved toward the agitated pile.

A tail wagged from between a leather-bound folio and a box of pens.

“Puddles!” Timothy said.

The dog emerged, tail first, pulling a blue folder.

“Good doggy,” Gallowglass crooned. He crouched down and held out his hand. “Bring it to me.”

Puddles stood with the missing page from Ashmole 782 gripped in her teeth, looking very pleased with herself. She did not, however, take it to Gallowglass.

“She wants you to chase her,” Timothy explained.

Gallowglass scowled. “I’m not chasing that dog.”

In the end we all chased her. Puddles was the fastest, cleverest dachshund who’d ever lived, darting under furniture and feinting left and then right before dashing away again. Gallowglass was speedy, but he was not small. Puddles slipped through his fingers again and again, her glee evident. Finally Puddles’ need to pant meant that she had to drop the now slightly moist blue folder in front of her paws. Gallowglass took the opportunity to reach in and secure it.

“What a good girl!” Timothy picked up the squirming dog. “You’re going to win the Great Dachshund Games this summer. No question.” A slip of paper was attached to one of Puddles’ claws.

“Hey. There’s my council tax bill.”

Gallowglass handed me the folder.

“Phoebe should do the honors,” I said. “If not for her, we wouldn’t be here.” I passed the folder on to her.

Phoebe cracked it open. The image inside was so vivid that it might have been painted yesterday, and its striking colors and the details of trunk and leaf only increased the sense of vibrancy that came from the page. There was power in it. That much was unmistakable.

“It’s beautiful.” Phoebe lifted her eyes. “Is this the page you’ve been looking for?”

“Aye,” Gallowglass said. “That’s it, all right.”

Phoebe placed the page in my waiting hands. As soon as the parchment touched them, they brightened, shooting little sparks of color into the room. Filaments of power erupted from my fingertips, connecting to the parchment with an almost audible snap of electricity.