Chapter 21

Chapter 21

T he strange sight of Baldwin de Clermont, leader of a notorious vampire clan, sitting under a striped umbrella in the shade of the witch’s tree, greeted us when we arrived the next morning at Ravenswood. A card table held his computer, and a long orange extension cord snaked between it and a tall green-and-white pillar candle decorated with a lightning bolt and a rabbit. It was well over ninety degrees, even in the shade, but the man still wore a suit. How wonderful to be a vampire now that the summer heat was here.

Matthew was playing catch with Becca and Pip in the marsh. He was quick to notice our return, followed shortly thereafter by the children and the animals. They clambered through the muck toward the meadow.

“Baldwin’s here,” Sarah said glumly.

I’d warned Matthew that Sarah was coming back to Ravenswood with us, and that the situation between us was tense. I couldn’t leave her alone at the Bishop House after all that had happened.

I didn’t tell him about discovering more of Mom’s memory bottles on her bureau, contained within Dior perfume bottles. Sarah, Gwyneth, and Janet had no idea what I’d found last night, either.

“Let the fun begin,” Janet said with false cheer. Having spent many years in Congregation meetings with my brother-in-law, she knew that fun and Baldwin seldom appeared in the same sentence.

“Julie’s here, too,” I said, eyeing the candle powering Baldwin’s laptop.

“Why on earth is he sitting outside?” Gwyneth asked as we drove past. I wanted to park as close to the house as I could for her sake; it had been a grueling few days.

“Hellooo!” Julie emerged from the back door of the Old Place with a bottle of red wine, some lemonade, and a pot of coffee. She had covered all the bases to soothe both mercurial vampires and Bright Born children.

What she hadn’t done was make tea. Disappointed, I stopped the car and put it into park.

“The tea’s steeping!” Julie announced as though she’d read my mind. “Hell’s bells! It’s Sarah Bishop. No wonder you all look exhausted. Come to the barn and have something to drink.”

“Julie.” Sarah gave her a cool nod. “I haven’t thought about you for ages.”

“Can’t say the same,” Julie replied, the honey in her tone belied by the anger that sparked in her eyes. “I think of you whenever I polish my hexes.”

“Why didn’t you let Matthew’s brother in the house, Julie?” Gwyneth asked. “He can’t be comfortable out there in the heat.”

“I tried,” Julie replied. “We all tried. Even Pip. But the wards won’t budge. Baldwin says he doesn’t mind, and that working outside reminds him of his days in the Roman army. He’s been telling me about the Macedonian Wars.”

Sarah was the first to climb out of the car, rushing to embrace the children. Ever the chivalrous knight, Matthew helped Gwyneth out before circling the rear of the vehicle to open Janet’s door and then mine.

“I’m so glad to see you,” I said as Matthew folded me into his arms. The longer he stayed at Ravenswood, the more he absorbed the ancient, homey scents of woodsmoke and salt. I tried to pull away, but my vampire held tight.

“Not yet,” he murmured. “Not quite yet.” When at last he released me, Matthew’s eyes were bright with curiosity.

“Can you get the boxes out of the back and bring them into the barn?” I asked, my hand on his arm in a gesture of patience.

“Of course, mon coeur. ” Matthew nodded.

“Don’t forget the shoebox,” I warned, thinking of the perfume bottles that were tucked inside.

“Please don’t feel you have to rush to free Baldwin,” Matthew said under his breath, lifting the box of bottles Janet had gathered from the stillroom cupboard as though it were light as down. “It’s much better to let him bark orders into the phone and supervise his vast wealth out here.”

Matthew was not the only creature who wasn’t relishing the prospect of spending time with Philippe’s eldest son.

“Is he staying long?” Sarah demanded.

“That’s up to Gwyneth,” I reminded her. “But Baldwin never remains in one place for more than a few days. I wouldn’t worry.”

“That’s one way to avoid assassination, I guess,” Sarah said dourly.

I climbed the hill and waited patiently for Baldwin to finish his call. As his blood-sworn sister, I owed him a proper greeting. The whole day would go more smoothly if I treated him with the respect due to the head of the extensive de Clermont family of which our Bishop-Clairmont scion was part. Besides, there was no point in interrupting Baldwin when he was making a deal or conducting a negotiation. He was doggedly determined and possessed of a laser focus—something that had benefited Matthew and me on more than one occasion. All too soon, his unwavering attention would be on us.

Baldwin glanced up as if noticing my presence for the first time.

“Your thirty minutes are up, Helmut,” Baldwin said, studying his watch. “You’ve failed to persuade me this purchase is sufficiently promising to take on so much risk. The answer is no.”

I heard sputtering on the other end of the line before Baldwin disconnected the call.

“Sister.” Baldwin surveyed me from head to toe and back again, then approached and gave me a formal kiss, then another, one on each cheek. Ever the predator, it gave him an opportunity to gauge my heartbeat and scent. “Matthew said that you were a different witch, but I see no great change. You are, perhaps, a bit thin and under stress, but after Matthew’s report I was prepared to find you at death’s door.”

Baldwin was like a bee trapped in a confined space; he had no choice but to sting.

“Thank you for coming, Baldwin,” I said.

“Matthew mentioned that the family is implicated in a dispute you’re having with the Congregation,” Baldwin said, straightening his cuffs. “Naturally, I came at once.”

“Shall we go inside and join the others?” I suggested, wilting in the humidity and eager to reconnect with the children, who had followed Julie, Sarah, Matthew—and the lemonade—into the barn. I turned toward the house, where Gwyneth stood. “That’s my aunt Gwyneth Proctor. She’s the owner of Ravenswood and graciously allowed you to be her guest here.”

Be nice, I warned Baldwin with a stern look as we descended to the Old Place.

“I didn’t want to interrupt your reunion with Diana—but I’m happy to officially welcome you,” Gwyneth said, extending her hand. “I’m sorry about the wards. I adjusted them for Matthew and may have gone overboard.”

“A pleasure,” Baldwin said. “I believe one of your relations was on the Congregation with me—Taliesin Proctor.”

“My older brother,” Gwyneth said.

“Lieutenant Proctor was a brave soldier and a good man.” Baldwin eschewed Gwyneth’s proffered handshake for a more European greeting of two kisses. Having taken the measure of my great-aunt, Baldwin offered his elbow for her to lean on. “So was his friend—what was his name? The one who died in Prague sometime after the war.”

“I think you mean Thomas Lloyd,” Gwyneth said, her voice level and matter-of-fact.

Baldwin registered the change in my heartbeat and scent that had followed the mention of my grandfather. He looked at me quizzically.

“Let’s limit our talk about my grandfathers and the war until I’ve caught up with the twins, and Julie has scooped them up for another adventure. They don’t need to know what’s happened—yet,” I said. There was no point in prevaricating or believing that I could keep this information from Baldwin.

“Grandfathers?” Baldwin’s ginger eyebrows rose.

I met his gaze without flinching. Baldwin saw the answers to some of his questions in my eyes.

“We have a lot to discuss,” I said.

“Ah. I see.” Baldwin bared his teeth in what some might have called a smile. I knew it for what it was: a promise that he would follow the trail of this new information until he possessed every morsel ofit.

“Let’s join the others,” Gwyneth said, lifting the remaining wards on Ravenswood so that Baldwin could move freely around the property. “It may take time for the place to recognize you as its own, I’m afraid. You are a vampire, and the spirits of the place can be hasty to judge those they haven’t yet accepted.”

“Fascinating,” Baldwin said, viewing the property with the speculative gaze of a real estate developer.

Matthew was propped in the doorway of the barn when we arrived. He straightened to let Gwyneth and Baldwin pass.

“Everything all right, ma lionne ?” Matthew inquired lazily.

My bat-eared husband had heard every word of the exchange between Baldwin and me.

“Tea,” I said firmly. “Before anything else, there must be tea.”

—

When the pandemonium of our arrival subsided to manageable levels, the midday sun was streaming through the high windows of the barn, gilding the dust motes sifting through the rafters. After Pip and Becca debriefed Sarah on everything that had happened at Ravenswood in the past twenty-four hours, Julie whisked the twins off to town on the Good Juju. She used the pretense of needing to pick up clams and oysters for dinner, though I knew she dearly wanted to stay and hear our news.

Baldwin formally introduced himself to Granny Dorcas, not realizing she was a ghost until she disapparated before his eyes in protest at the increasing number of vampires who were disturbing her afterlife.

The boxes of memory bottles we’d retrieved from the Bishop House, along with an L. L. Bean shoebox and a cardboard box with my mother’s book of shadows, were all waiting on the worktable. I pulled out a few of the containers for show-and-tell: short jars, tall jars, and a distinctively shaped flattened oval bottle that had once held my mother’s favorite wine. Not only was this last example sealed with a cork, it was festooned with white, pink, and blue stalactites of wax that had dripped down the sides, evidence that the contents had been consumed over the course of a romantic evening sometime in the 1970s, when Mateus was the height of sophistication.

I didn’t touch the shoebox, and Janet eyed it with curiosity. Gwyneth joined us with two test tubes and a roll of felt tied with woven strings. She indicated she was ready with a nod.

“This is your meeting, Diana,” Baldwin said, looking down at his watch. “I have a phone call in an hour. Shall we begin?”

Matthew looked daggers at his brother, irked by his officious tone, but I didn’t mind Baldwin’s directness. After Madison, it was a relief to know exactly where I stood.

“Gwyneth and I took Janet to Madison to reclaim her mother Griselda’s memories from 1692,” I said, plunging straight into the heart of the matter. “She was in Salem and visited Bridget Bishop and some of the other accused witches in the gaol.”

“Your reports are admirably concise, sister,” Baldwin said, tenting his fingers. “Please continue.”

“We brought it back to Ravenswood so we could open it safely,” I said.

“I wanted Matthew to witness the memories as well.” Janet removed a small bottle from its hiding place tucked into a ball of wool in her knitting bag.

“How extraordinary.” Baldwin peered at the small bottle. “How many memories can a tiny vial like that contain?”

“There’s only one memory in a bottle—unless something’s gone horribly wrong,” Janet said, carrying the relic around the table and depositing it on an impromptu book cradle I’d fashioned from two spell-looms propped between two grimoires. It would not have passed muster with Bodley’s Librarian, but it would protect the precious object from clumsy fingers.

“Do you hold it up to the light to view the memory?” Baldwin asked, squinting at the bottle.

“Nothing so easy,” Gwyneth said with regret. “Can you get me the smallest spider on my bench, Diana? The one that I use to hold phials of mercury. And a bottle of bladder wrack, please. Wet, not dry.”

I knew exactly which piece of equipment she meant. It had been designed to hold a narrow bottle or small test tube. The bladder wrack was easy to find among the alphabetically arranged herbs and spices. Sarah, her curiosity caught, watched as Gwyneth withdrew a few damp sprigs of the seaweed that grew around the marsh. Gwyneth murmured a spell and the small green pouches swelled as though they were being inflated with a tiny pair of invisible bellows.

“Memories can only be viewed if they are released from the pressure of their confinement. We don’t want any cracks to develop in the glass when we do so, however. There’s quite a difference between volatile, pressurized memories escaping due to neglect or breakage and their release under controlled conditions.” Gwyneth tucked a piece of bladder wrack around the bottle. “So long as I use plenty of this for a cushion, I think we can keep the neck from breaking.”

“Let me hold that,” Sarah said, using the tip of her pinkie to keep a strand of inflated seaweed in place. My aunt’s enthusiasm for the study of magic was overcoming her previous fear and hostility toward the Proctors and their methods.

“Thank you, Sarah,” Gwyneth said, accepting the offer of help and the olive branch that came withit.

“Where did you learn these skills, Gwyneth?” Baldwin asked. “They seem far more technical and precise than most magic.”

“Higher magic is techne, Baldwin. A wonderfully nuanced Greek word, as you must know,” Gwyneth replied. “It means art as well as craft, and skill as well as technique.”

With great delicacy, Gwyneth added more bladder wrack to the aperture of the spider.

“As for the techne itself,” Gwyneth continued, “I learned it from my mother, who learned it from her mother before her, all the way back into the mists of time where only memory can take us, before there were books and telephones and photographs.”

Gwyneth slid the bladder wrack–wrapped neck of the bottle into the opening of the spider. She murmured another spell and the aperture gently closed around the cushion of air and seaweed while we held our collective breath.

“That’s why it’s best to learn higher magic from close relations,” Gwyneth told Baldwin. “Every witch’s talent for higher magic is as unique as a fingerprint, but it always reflects her lineage. That’s why the oracles insisted I call Diana home. She needed to be among her Proctor kin to learn the techne of her people.”

“I see.” Baldwin understood Gwyneth’s position—and her decision. The de Clermont family legacy meant everything to him.

“What comes next?” Sarah asked, eager to learn more. Because she wasn’t an initiate in higher magic, neither Mom nor Grandma had explained the intricacies of memory bottles to her.

“Next, we need to create a memory chamber. There’s no telling how dark the memories inside the bottle might be, so it’s important to draw as much Light into the chamber as we can without breaking the integrity of the Shadow that holds the memories together.” Gwyneth conjured a pearly bubble. It bobbed over the bottle, waiting for her next move.

“I’m about to enlarge the chamber. This is your last chance to leave the barn before I release the bottle’s memories,” Gwyneth warned. “Once you’re under the memory’s spell, you won’t be free of it until Griselda’s experiences are safely contained again.”

“What are we likely to see?” Sarah looked uneasy. “A hanging?”

I shuddered at the thought.

“There’s no way to know in advance,” Gwyneth replied. “It’s a bit like an experiment. Janet has a hypothesis, though.”

“I think Mam’s bottle contains memories she gathered in Salem before Bridget Bishop was hanged,” Janet explained.

“Let’s open it and see.” Gwyneth blew gently on the bubble, which expanded until we were all contained within it. Surrounded with pearly light, we looked as preternaturally pale as vampires. The Light bleached Sarah’s thick red curls into a strange mauve, and even Matthew’s black head looked more silvered.

My aunt walked us through the next steps of the complicated process, her teaching skills on full display.

“First, you want to be sure your chamber has enough room for the memory to breathe,” Gwyneth continued. “Cast too small a sphere and the memory you experience will be short and abrupt, lacking flow and context. Make it too big, and the memory will be so diffuse and unfocused you’ll struggle to know what’s going on.”

“And then you must factor in weight, age, pressure, and the number of viewers.” Janet sighed. “It’s all physics and I was never particularly good at maths. That’s why I wanted Gwyneth to do the honors.”

“Next, you want to carefully melt the wax seal on the bottle, using a shadowlight rather than a witchlight.” Gwyneth conjured up a flickering, dove-gray spark. “A cool flame is essential. You don’t want to burn the memory bottle’s original fittings, and sometimes there are messages and other items stuffed into the neck.”

I’d had many opportunities to watch Gwyneth at work this summer, and been impressed with her feel for higher magic, but her shadowlights were particularly beautiful. They were luminous without being hot, and bright without being filled with Light.

My aunt wrapped a blue-gray wisp of shadowlight around the wax closure that still clung to the cork. With a skill any sommelier would have envied, Gwyneth used the wisp of power to neatly separate the wax and cork from the glass. With a delicate touch, Gwyneth lifted the cork.

I braced myself for impact.

Nothing happened.

“Where’s the memory?” Matthew whispered, looking around the room as though it might be hiding in the corner.

Gwyneth peered into the neck of the bottle.

“Ah. Janet’s mother put a secondary closure in the bottle for safety,” Gwyneth said. “It looks like a braided lock of hair tied with a bit of red string. A wise precaution.”

“Mam was nothing if not thorough,” Janet said.

“Some witches, like Meg, believe that hair-locks are a second line of defense to keep especially volatile and vulnerable memories from exploding when the wax seal is broken,” Gwyneth said. “Others think they form tamperproof seals. If the hair had fallen from the neck of the bottle into the bulb, you would know someone had meddled with the contents.”

“Like putting a thread, or a line of salt, across a threshold,” Matthew said.

“Exactly,” Gwyneth said. “If you could reach into that roll of tools and get my lorgnette and the extra-fine crochet hook, Matthew, I would be grateful.”

Inside, in addition to the opera glasses and crochet hooks, were knitting needles, several pairs of tweezers, a long-handled mirror like a dentist might use, and a tiny scalpel.

“Those look like they belong to Sweeney Todd.” Sarah shuddered. She would rather have been stung by hornets than have her teeth examined.

“Not quite so gruesome, Sarah, but an extraction is needed before we proceed,” Gwyneth said, taking the implements from Matthew. “Is everyone ready?”

We looked at one another, dubious. The closer I got to witnessing moments from Salem’s darkest days, the less sure I was that this was a good idea.

“Once I remove the hair-lock, the memories are going to come out,” Gwyneth reminded us, the crochet hook poised over the opening. “They’ll fill this memory chamber, then slowly sink under the weight of the past. I will direct them back into their bottle—or a test tube if the bottle is no longer viable—and reseal them.”

“Proceed,” Baldwin said with the crisp tone of a commanding officer.

Gwyneth gave me a silent nod, then cocked her head to indicate she was about to remove the hair-lock.

The next thing I knew I had tumbled into the body of Griselda Gowdie.