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.
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 them, 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. Matthew and I laughed, but as far as Sarah was concerned, this was war. From that moment my aunt and the house were in an all-out battle for supremacy.
The house was winning, thanks to its chief weapon: Fleetwood Mac. Sarah had bashed Mom’s old radio to bits two days after we found it during a never-ending concert of “The Chain.” The house retaliated by removing all the toilet-paper rolls from the bathroom cabinets and replacing them with a variety of electronic gadgets capable of playing music. It made for a rousing morning alarm.
Nothing deterred the house from playing selections from the band’s first two albums—not even Sarah’s defenestration of three record players, an eight-track tape machine, and an ancient Dictaphone. The house simply diverted the music through the furnace, the bass notes reverberating in the ductwork while the treble wafted from the heating vents.
With all her ire directed at the house, Sarah was surprisingly patient and gentle with me. We had turned the stillroom inside out looking for Mom’s spell book, going so far as to remove all the drawers and shelves from the cabinet. We’d found some surprisingly graphic love letters from the 1820s hidden beneath one drawer’s false bottom and a macabre collection of rodent skulls tacked in orderly rows behind a sliding panel at the back of the shelving, but no spell book. The house would present it when it was ready.