Ysabeau was merciful y absent at lunch. Afterward I wanted to go straight to Matthew's study and start examining Aurora Consurgens, but he convinced me to take a bath first. It would, he promised, make the inevitable muscle stiffness more bearable. Halfway upstairs, I had to stop and rub a cramp in my leg. I was going to pay for the morning's enthusiasm.
The bath was heavenly-long, hot, and relaxing. I put on loose black trousers, a sweater, and a pair of socks and padded downstairs, where a fire was blazing. My flesh turned orange and red as I held my hands out to the flames.
What would it be like to control fire? My fingers tingled in response to the question, and I slid them safely into my pockets.
Matthew looked up from his desk. "Your manuscript is next to your computer."
Its black covers drew me as surely as a magnet. I sat down at the table and opened them, holding the book careful y. The colors were even brighter than I remembered.
After staring at the queen for several minutes, I turned the first page.
"Incipit tractatus Aurora Consurgens intitulatus." The words were familiar-"Here begins the treatise cal ed the Rising of the Dawn"-but I stil felt the shiver of pleasure associated with seeing a manuscript for the first time.
"Everything good comes to me along with her. She is known as the Wisdom of the South, who calls out in the streets, and to the multitudes," I read silently, translating from the Latin. It was a beautiful work, ful of paraphrases from Scripture as wel as other texts.
"Do you have a Bible up here?" It would be wise for me to have one handy as I made my way through the manuscript.
"Yes-but I'm not sure where it is. Do you want me to look for it?" Matthew rose slightly from his chair, but his eyes were stil glued to his computer screen.
"No, I'l find it." I got up and ran my finger down the edge of the nearest shelf. Matthew's books were arranged not by size but in a running time line. Those on the first bookshelf were so ancient that I couldn't bear to think about what they contained-the lost works of Aristotle, perhaps? Anything was possible.
Roughly half of Matthew's books were shelved spine in to protect the books' fragile edges. Many of these had identifying marks written along the edges of the pages, and thick black letters spel ed out a title here, an author's name there. Halfway around the room, the books began to appear spine out, their titles and authors embossed in gold and silver.
I slid past the manuscripts with their thick and bumpy pages, some with smal Greek letters on the front edge. I kept going, looking for a large, fat, printed book. My index finger froze in front of one bound in brown leather and covered with gilding.
"Matthew, please tel me 'Biblia Sacra 1450' is not what I think it is."
"Okay, it's not what you think it is," he said automatical y, fingers racing over the keys with more than human speed.
He was paying little attention to what I was doing and none at al to what I was saying.
Leaving Gutenberg's Bible where it was, I continued along the shelves, hoping that it wasn't the only one available to me. My finger froze again at a book labeled Will's Playes. "Were these books given to you by friends?"
"Most of them." Matthew didn't even look up.
Like German printing, the early days of English drama were a subject for later discussion.
For the most part, Matthew's books were in pristine condition. This was not entirely surprising, given their owner. Some, though, were wel worn. A slender, tal book on the bottom shelf, for instance, had corners so torn and thin you could see the wooden boards peeking through the leather. Curious to see what had made this book a favorite, I pul ed it out and opened the pages. It was Vesalius's anatomy book from 1543, the first to depict dissected human bodies in exacting detail.
Now hunting for fresh insights into Matthew, I sought out the next book to show signs of heavy use. This time it was a smal er, thicker volume. Inked onto the fore edge was the title De motu. Wil iam Harvey's study of the circulation of the blood and his explanation of how the heart pumped must have been interesting reading for vampires when it was first published in the 1620s, though they must already have had some notion that this might be the case.
Matthew's wel -worn books included works on electricity, microscopy, and physiology. But the most battered book I'd seen yet was resting on the nineteenth-century shelves: a first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Sneaking a glance at Matthew, I pul ed the book off the shelf with the stealth of a shoplifter. Its green cloth binding, with the title and author stamped in gold, was frayed with wear. Matthew had written his name in a beautiful copperplate script on the flyleaf.
There was a letter folded inside.
"Dear Sir," it began. "Your letter of 15 October has reached me at last. I am mortified at my slow reply. I have for many years been collecting all the facts which I could in regard to the variation and origin of species, and your approval of my reasonings comes as welcome news as my book will soon pass into the publisher's hands." It was signed "C. Darwin," and the date was 1859.
The two men had been exchanging letters just weeks prior to Origin's publication in November.
The book's pages were covered with the vampire's notes in pencil and ink, leaving hardly an inch of blank paper. Three chapters were annotated even more heavily than the rest. They were the chapters on instinct, hybridism, and the affinities between the species.
Like Harvey's treatise on the circulation of blood, Darwin's seventh chapter, on natural instincts, must have been page-turning reading for vampires. Matthew had underlined specific passages and written above and below the lines as wel as in the margins as he grew more excited by Darwin's ideas. "Hence, we may conclude, that domestic instincts have been acquired and natural instincts have been lost partly by habit, and partly by man selecting and accumulating during successive generations, peculiar mental habits and actions, which at first appeared from what we must in our ignorance call an accident. " Matthew's scribbled remarks included questions about which instincts might have been acquired and whether accidents were possible in nature. "Can it be that we have maintained as instincts what humans have given up through accident and habit?" he asked across the bottom margin. There was no need for me to ask who was included in "we." He meant creatures-not just vampires, but witches and daemons, too.
In the chapter on hybridism, Matthew's interest had been caught by the problems of crossbreeding and sterility. "First crosses between forms sufficiently distinct to be ranked as species, and their hybrids," Darwin wrote, "are very generally, but not universally, sterile." A sketch of a family tree crowded the margins next to the underlined passage.
There was a question mark where the roots belonged and four branches. "Why has inbreeding not led to sterility or madness?" Matthew wondered in the tree's trunk. At the top of the page, he had written, "1 species or 4?" and "comment sont faites les d
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