The Book of Life

“Rebecca made ink from it. When she used that ink to copy out a charm, the force of it could suck the power out of half the town. There were lots of blackouts in Madison during your mother’s teen years.” Sarah chuckled. “Her spell book should be here somewhere—unless the house ate it while I was gone. That will tell you more.”

“Spell book?” I frowned. “What was wrong with the Bishop grimoire?”

“Most witches who practice the higher, darker magics keep their own grimoire. It’s tradition,”

Sarah said, rummaging around in the cupboard. “Nope. It doesn’t seem to be here.”

Despite the pang of disappointment that accompanied Sarah’s announcement, I was relieved. I already had one mysterious book in my life. I wasn’t sure I wanted another—even if it might shed light on why Emily had been trying to summon my mother’s spirit at Sept-Tours.

“Oh, no.” Sarah backed away from the cupboard, a look of horror on her face.

“Is there a rat?” My experiences in London had conditioned me to believe that they lurked in every dusty corner. I peered into the cupboard’s depths but saw only a collection of grimy jars containing herbs and roots and an ancient clock radio. Its brown cord hung down from the shelf like Corra’s tail, waving gently in the breeze. I sneezed.

As if on cue, a strange metallic clinking and rolling started in the walls, like coins being fed into a jukebox. The musical grinding that followed, reminiscent of an old record player set to 33 rpm instead of 45 rpm, soon gave way to a recognizable song.

I cocked my head. “Is that . . . Fleetwood Mac?”

“No. Not again!” Sarah looked as if she’d seen a ghost. I glanced around, but the only invisible presence in the room was Stevie Nicks and a Welsh witch named Rhiannon. In the seventies the song had been a coming-out anthem for scores of witches and wizards.

“I guess the house is waking up.” Maybe that was what was upsetting Sarah.

Sarah darted to the door and lifted the latch, but it wouldn’t budge. She banged on the wooden panels. The music got louder.

“This isn’t my favorite Stevie Nicks tune either,” I said, trying to calm her, “but it won’t last forever. Maybe you’ll like the next song better.”

“The next song is ‘Over My Head.’ I know the whole damn album by heart. Your mother listened to it all through her pregnancy. It went on for months. Just when Rebecca seemed to get over her obsession, Fleetwood Mac’s next album came out. It was hell . ” Sarah tore at her hair.

“Really?” I was always hungry for details about my parents. “Fleetwood Mac seems more like Dad’s kind of band.”

“We have to stop the music.” Sarah went to the window, but the sash wouldn’t move. She thumped on the frame in frustration.

“Let me try.” The harder I pushed, the louder the music got. There was a momentary pause after Stevie Nicks stopped warbling about Rhiannon. A few seconds later, Christine McVie informed us how nice it was to be in over your head. The window remained closed.

“This is a nightmare!” Sarah exploded. She jammed her hands over her ears to block the sound, then raced to the grimoire and flipped through the pages. “Prudence Willard’s dog-bite cure. Patience Severance’s method for sweetening sour milk.” She flipped some more. “Clara Bishop’s spell for stopping up a drafty chimney! That might work.”

“But it’s music, not smoke,” I said, peering over Sarah’s shoulder at the lines of text.

“Both are carried on the air.” Sarah rolled up her sleeves. “If it doesn’t do the trick, we’ll try something else. Maybe thunder. I’m good with thunder. That might interrupt the energy and drive the sound away.”

I started to hum along to the song. It was catchy, in a 1970s kind of way.

“Don’t you start.” Sarah’s eyes were wild. She turned back to the grimoire. “Get me some eyebright, please. And plug in the coffeemaker.”

I dutifully went to the ancient outlet strip and shoved the coffeemaker’s cord into it. Electricity leaped from the socket in orange and blue arcs. I jumped back.

“You need a surge protector—preferably one bought in the last decade—or you’re going to burn the whole house down,” I told Sarah.

She kept muttering as she put a paper filter into the swing-out basket in the coffeemaker, followed by an extensive selection of herbs.

Since we were trapped inside the stillroom and Sarah didn’t seem to want my help, I might as well work on the words to accompany my anti-nightmare spell for the children. I went to my mother’s cabinet and found some black ink, a quill pen, and a slip of paper.

Matthew knocked on the windowpane. “Are you two all right? I smelled something burning.”

“A minor electrical problem!” I shouted, waving my quill pen in the air. Then I remembered that Matthew was a vampire and could hear me perfectly well through stone, brick, wood, and yes, single panes of glass. I lowered my voice. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Over My Head” screeched to a halt, and “You Make Loving Fun” began. Nice choice, I thought, smiling at Matthew. Who needed a deejay when you had magical radio?

“Oh, God. The house has moved on to their second album,” Sarah groaned. “I hate Rumours. ”

“Where is that music coming from?” Matthew frowned.

“Mom’s old clock radio.” I pointed with the feather. “She liked Fleetwood Mac.” I glanced at my aunt, who was reciting the words to Clara Bishop’s spell with her hands clapped over her ears. “Sarah doesn’t.”

“Ah.” Matthew’s brow cleared. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He pressed his hand against the glass in a silent gesture of farewell.

My heart filled. Loving Matthew wasn’t all I wanted to do, but he was definitely the only one for me. I wished there wasn’t a pane of glass between us so I that could tell him so.

Glass is only sand and fire. One puff of smoke later, a pile of sand lay on the windowsill. I reached through the empty square in the window frame and clasped his hand.

“Thanks for checking on us. It’s been an interesting afternoon. I have a lot to tell you.”

Matthew blinked at our twined hands.

“You make me very happy, you know.”

“I try,” he said with a shy grin.

“You succeed. Do you think Fernando could rescue Sarah?” I lowered my voice. “The house has jammed the stillroom doors and windows shut, and she’s about to blow. She’s going to need a cigarette when she gets out, and a stiff drink.”

“Fernando hasn’t rescued a woman in distress for some time, but I’m sure he remembers how,”

Matthew assured me. “Will the house let him?”

“Give it five minutes or until the music stops, whichever comes first.” I pulled free and blew him a kiss. It had rather more fire and water than usual, and enough air behind it to land with a decided smack on his cheek.

I returned to the worktable and dipped my mother’s quill pen into the ink. It smelled of blackberries and walnuts. Thanks to my experience with Elizabethan writing implements, I was able to write out the charm for Sarah’s dream pillows without a single splotch.

[des: see comment above; spells have been styled as poetry; author had

them centered on the page. she intends this one to be an ovoid shape, like a

mirror]

Mirror

Shimmers

Monsters Shake

Banish Nightmares

Until We

Wake

I blew on it gently to set the ink. Very respectable, I decided. It was much better than my spell for conjuring fire, and easy enough for children to remember. When the pods were dry and the papery covering rubbed off, I’d write the charm in tiny letters right on their silvery surface.

Eager to show my work to Sarah, I slid down from the stool. One look at her face convinced me to put it off until my aunt had had her whiskey and a smoke. She’d been hoping for decades that I’d show an interest in magic. I could wait another twenty minutes for my grade in Sleeping Charms 101.

A slight tingle behind me alerted me to a ghostly presence a moment before a hug as soft as down settled around my shoulders.

“Nice job, peanut,” whispered a familiar voice. “Excellent taste in music, too.”

When I turned my head, there was nothing except a faint smudge of green, but I didn’t need to see my father to know that he was there.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said softly.

11

Matthew took the news about my mother’s proficiency with higher magic better than expected. He had long suspected that something existed between the homely work of the craft and the bright spectacles of elemental magic. He was not at all surprised that I, in another mark of in-betweenness, could practice such a magic. What shocked him was that this talent came through my mother’s blood.

“I’ll have to take a closer look at your mtDNA workup after all,” he said, giving one of my mother’s inks a sniff.

“Sounds good.” It was the first time Matthew had shown any desire to return to his genetic research. Days had gone by without any mention of Oxford, Baldwin, the Book of Life, or blood rage.

And while he might have forgotten that there was genetic information bound up in Ashmole 782, I had not. Once we had the manuscript back in our hands, we were going to need his scientific skills to decipher it.

“You’re right. There’s definitely blood in it, as well as resin and acacia.” Matthew swirled the ink around. Acacia, I’d learned this morning, was the source of gum arabic, which made the ink less runny.

“I thought as much. The inks used in Ashmole 782 had blood in it, too. It must be a more common practice than I thought,” I said.

“There’s some frankincense in it, too.” Matthew said, ignoring my mention of the Book of Life.

“Ah. That’s what gives it that exotic scent.” I rummaged through the remaining bottles, hoping to find something else to catch his biochemical curiosity.

“That and the blood, of course,” Matthew said drily.

“If it’s my mother’s blood, that could shed even more light on my DNA,” I remarked. “My talent for higher magic, too.”

“Hmm,” Matthew said noncommittally.

“What about this one?” I drew the stopper out of a bottle of blue-green liquid, and the scent of a summer garden filled the air.

“That’s made from iris,” Matthew said. “Remember your search for green ink in London?”

“So this is what Master Platt’s fantastically expensive ink looked like!” I laughed.

“Made from roots imported from Florence. Or so he said.” Matthew surveyed the table and its blue, red, black, green, purple, and magenta pots of liquid. “It looks like you have enough ink to keep you going for some time.”

He was right: I had enough to get me through the next few weeks. And that was as far as I was willing to project, even if my left pinkie was throbbing in anticipation of the future.

“This should be plenty, even with all the jobs Sarah has for me,” I agreed. Each of the open jars on the table had a small slip of paper underneath with a note in her sprawling handwriting. “Mosquito bites,” read one. “Better cell-phone reception,” read another. Her requests made me feel like a server at a fast-food restaurant. “Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime,” Matthew said, kissing me good-bye.

Over the next few days, the routines of daily life began to anchor us to the Bishop house and to each other—even without the steadying presence of Em, who had always been the house’s center of gravity.

Fernando was a domestic tyrant—far worse than Em ever was—and his changes to Sarah’s diet and exercise plan were radical and inflexible. He signed my aunt up for a CSA program that delivered a box of exotic vegetables like kale and chard every week, and he walked the property’s fence line with her whenever she tried to sneak a cigarette. Fernando cooked and cleaned and even plumped cushions—all of which had me wondering about his life with Hugh.

“When we didn’t have servants—and that was often the case—I kept the house,” he explained, hanging up clothes on the line. “If I’d waited for Hugh to do it, we’d have lived in squalor. He didn’t pay attention to such mundane matters as clean sheets or whether we had run out of wine. Hugh was either writing poetry or planning a three-month siege. There was no time in his day for domestic chores.”

“And Gallowglass?” I asked, handing him a clothespin.

“Gallowglass is worse. Not even the furniture—or lack of it—matters to him. We came home one night to find our house robbed and Gallowglass sleeping on the table like a Viking warrior ready to be sent out to sea.” Fernando shook his head. “Besides, I enjoy the work. Keeping house is like preparing weapons for battle. It’s repetitive and very soothing.” His confession made me feel less guilty about letting him do all the cooking.

Fernando’s other domain, aside from the kitchen, was the toolshed. He’d cleared out what was broken, cleaned and sharpened what remained, and bought items he felt were missing, like a scythe. The edges on the rose secateurs were now so keen you could slice a tomato with them. I was reminded of all the wars that had been fought using common household implements and wondered if Fernando were quietly arming us for combat.

Sarah, for her part, grumbled at the new regime but went along with it. When she got cranky—which was often—she took it out on the house. It was still not fully awake, but periodic rumblings of activity reminded us that its self-imposed hibernation was drawing to a close. Most of its energy was directed at Sarah. One morning we woke to find that all the liquor in the house had been dumped down the sink and a makeshift mobile of empty bottles and silverware was attached to the kitchen light fixture.