Free A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness Page A

library will sense it soon, if they haven’t already.”
    “I appreciate the warning. But I don’t need your help.” I prepared to stalk away, but his hand shot out and gripped my upper arm, stopping me in my tracks.
    “Don’t be too sure of that. Be careful. Please.” Clairmont hesitated, his face shaken out of its perfect lines as he wrestled with something. “Especially if you see that wizard again.”
    I stared fixedly at the hand on my arm. Clairmont released me. His lids dropped, shuttering his eyes.
    My row back to the boathouse was slow and steady, but the repetitive movements weren’t able to carry away my lingering confusion and unease. Every now and again, there was a gray blur on the towpath, but nothing else caught my attention except for people bicycling home from work and a very ordinary human walking her dog.
    After returning the equipment and locking the boathouse, I set off down the towpath at a measured jog.
    Matthew Clairmont was standing across the river in front of the University Boat House.
    I began to run, and when I looked back over my shoulder, he was gone.

Chapter 5
    A fter dinner I sat down on the sofa by the sitting room’s dormant fireplace and switched on my laptop. Why would a scientist of Clairmont’s caliber want to see an alchemical manuscript—even one under a spell—so much that he’d sit at the Bodleian all day, across from a witch, and read through old notes on morphogenesis? His business card was tucked into one of the pockets of my bag. I fished it out, propping it up against the screen.
    On the Internet, below an unrelated link to a murder mystery and the unavoidable hits from social-networking sites, a string of biographical listings looked promising: his faculty Web page, a Wikipedia article, and links to the current fellows of the Royal Society.
    I clicked on the faculty Web page and snorted. Matthew Clairmont was one of those faculty members who didn’t like to post any information—even academic information—on the Net. On Yale’s Web site, a visitor could get contact information and a complete vita for practically every member of the faculty. Oxford clearly had a different attitude toward privacy. No wonder a vampire taught here.
    There hadn’t been a hit for Clairmont at the hospital, though the affiliation was on his card. I typed “John Radcliffe Neurosciences” into the search box and was led to an overview of the department’s services. There wasn’t a single reference to a physician, however, only a lengthy list of research interests. Clicking systematically through the terms, I finally found him on a page dedicated to the “frontal lobe,” though there was no additional information.
    The Wikipedia article was no help at all, and the Royal Society’s site was no better. Anything useful hinted at on the main pages was hidden behind passwords. I had no luck imagining what Clairmont’s user name and password might be and was refused access to anything at all after my sixth incorrect guess.
    Frustrated, I entered the vampire’s name into the search engines for scientific journals.
    “Yes.” I sat back in satisfaction.
    Matthew Clairmont might not have much of a presence on the Internet, but he was certainly active in the scholarly literature. After clicking a box to sort the results by date, I was provided with a snapshot of his intellectual history.
    My initial sense of triumph faded. He didn’t have one intellectual history. He had four.
    The first began with the brain. Much of it was beyond me, but Clairmont seemed to have made a scientific and medical reputation at the same time by studying how the brain’s frontal lobe processes urges and cravings. He’d made several major breakthroughs related to the role that neural mechanisms play in delayed-gratification responses, all of which involved the prefrontal cortex. I opened a new browser window to view an anatomical diagram and locate which bit of the brain was at issue.
    Some argued that