Chapter Five
The School of Night might debate philosophy, but on one point they were agreed: A witch would still have to be found. Matthew dispatched George and Kit to make inquiries in Oxford, as well as to ask after our mysterious alchemical manuscript.
After supper on Thursday evening, we took our places around the hearth in the great hall. Henry and Tom read and argued about astronomy or mathematics. Walter and Kit played dice at a long table, trading ideas about their latest literary projects. I was reading aloud from Walter’s copy of The Faerie Queene to practice my accent and enjoying it no more than I did most Elizabethan romances.
“The beginning is too abrupt, Kit. You’ll frighten the audience so badly they’ll leave the playhouse before the second scene,” Walter protested. “It needs more adventure.” They had been dissecting Doctor Faustus for hours. Thanks to Widow Beaton, it had a new opening.
“You are not my Faustus, Walt, for all your intellectual pretentions,” Kit said sharply. “Look what your meddling did to Edmund’s story. The Faerie Queene was a perfectly enjoyable tale about King Arthur. Now it’s a calamitous blend of Malory and Virgil, it wends on and on, and Gloriana— please. The queen is nearly as old as Widow Beaton and just as crotchety. It will astonish me if Edmund finishes it, with you telling him what to do all the time. If you want to be immortalized on the boards, talk to Will. He’s always hard up for ideas.”
“Is that agreeable to you, Matthew?” George prompted. He was updating us on his search for the manuscript that would one day be known as Ashmole 782.
“I’m sorry, George. Did you say something?” There was a flash of guilt in Matthew’s distracted gray eyes. I knew the signs of mental multitasking. It had gotten me through many a faculty meeting. His thoughts were probably divided among the conversations in the room, his ongoing review of what went awry with Widow Beaton, and the contents of the mailbags that continued to arrive.
“None of the booksellers have heard of a rare alchemical work circulating in the city. I asked a friend at Christ Church, and he too knows nothing. Shall I keep asking for it?”
Matthew opened his mouth to respond, but a crash sounded in the front hallway as the heavy front door flew open. He was on his feet in an instant. Walter and Henry jumped up and scrabbled for their daggers, which they’d taken to wearing morning, noon, and night.
“Matthew?” boomed an unfamiliar voice with a timbre that instinctively raised the hairs on my arms. It was too clear and musical to be human. “Are you here, man?”
“Of course he’s here,” someone else replied, his voice lilting in the cadence of a Welsh native. “Use your nose. Who else smells like a grocer’s shop the day fresh spices arrive from the docks?”
Moments later two bulky figures swathed in rough brown cloaks appeared at the other end of the room, where Kit and George still sat with their dice and books. In my own time, professional football teams would have recruited the new arrivals. They had overdeveloped arms with prominent tendons, enlarged wrists, thickly muscled legs, and brawny shoulders. As the men drew closer, light from the candles caught their bright eyes and danced off the honed edges of their weapons. One was a blond giant an inch taller than Matthew; the other was a redhead a good six inches shorter with a decided squint in his left eye. Neither could be more than thirty. The blond was relieved, though he hid it quickly. The redhead was furious and didn’t care who knew it.
“There you are. You gave us a fright, disappearing without leaving word,” the blond man said mildly, drawing to a stop and sheathing his long, exceedingly sharp sword.
Walter and Henry, too, withdrew their weapons. They recognized the men. “Gallowglass. Why are you here?” Matthew asked the blond warrior with a note of wary confusion.
“We’re looking for you, of course. Hancock and I were with you on Saturday.” Gallowglass’s chilly blue eyes narrowed when he didn’t receive a reply. He looked like a Viking on the brink of a killing spree. “In Chester.”
“Chester.” Matthew’s expression turned to dawning horror. “Chester!”
“Aye. Chester,” repeated the redheaded Hancock. He glowered and peeled sodden leather gauntlets from his arms, tossing them onto the floor near the fireplace. “When you didn’t meet up with us as planned on Sunday, we made inquiries. The innkeeper told us you’d left, which came as something of a surprise, and not only because you hadn’t settled the bill.”
“He said you were sitting by the fire drinking wine one moment and gone the next,” Gallowglass reported. “The maid—the little one with the black hair who couldn’t take her eyes off you—caused quite a stir. She insisted you were taken by ghosts.”
I closed my eyes in sudden understanding. The Matthew Roydon who had been in sixteenth-century Chester vanished because he was displaced by the Matthew who’d traveled here from modern-day Oxfordshire. When we left, the sixteenth-century Matthew, presumably, would reappear. Time wouldn’t allow both Matthews to be in the same place at the same moment. We had already altered history without intending to do so.
“It was All Hallows’ Eve, so her story made a certain sort of sense,” Hancock conceded, turning his attention to his cloak. He shook the water from its folds and flung it over a nearby chair, releasing the scent of spring grass into the winter air.