Free A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness Page B

all scholarship is thinly veiled autobiography. My pulse jumped. Given that Clairmont was a vampire, I sincerely hoped delayed gratification was something he was good at.
    My next few clicks showed that Clairmont’s work took a surprising turn away from the brain and toward wolves—Norwegian wolves, to be precise. He must have spent a considerable amount of time in the Scandinavian nights in the course of his research—which posed no problem for a vampire, considering their body temperature and ability to see in the dark. I tried to imagine him in a parka and grubby clothes with a notepad in the snow—and failed.
    After that, the first references to blood appeared.
    While the vampire was with the wolves in Norway, he’d started analyzing their blood to determine family groups and inheritance patterns. Clairmont had isolated four clans among the Norwegian wolves, three of which were indigenous. The fourth he traced back to a wolf that had arrived in Norway from Sweden or Finland. There was, he concluded, a surprising amount of mating across packs, leading to an exchange of genetic material that influenced species evolution.
    Now he was tracing inherited traits among other animal species as well as in humans. Many of his most recent publications were technical—methods for staining tissue samples and processes for handling particularly old and fragile DNA.
    I grabbed a fistful of my hair and held tight, hoping the pressure would increase blood circulation and get my tired synapses firing again. This made no sense. No scientist could produce this much work in so many different subdisciplines. Acquiring the skills alone would take more than a lifetime— a human lifetime, that is.
    A vampire might well pull it off, if he had been working on problems like this over the span of decades. Just how old was Matthew Clairmont behind that thirty-something face?
    I got up and made a fresh cup of tea. With the mug steaming in one hand, I rooted through my bag until I found my mobile and punched in a number with my thumb.
    One of the best things about scientists was that they always had their phones. They answered them on the second ring, too.
    “Christopher Roberts.”
    “Chris, it’s Diana Bishop.”
    “Diana!” Chris’s voice was warm, and there was music blaring in the background. “I heard you won another prize for your book. Congratulations!”
    “Thanks,” I said, shifting in my seat. “It was quite unexpected.”
    “Not to me. Speaking of which, how’s the research going? Have you finished writing your keynote?”
    “Nowhere near,” I said. That’s what I should be doing, not tracking down vampires on the Internet. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you in the lab. Do you have a minute?”
    “Sure.” He shouted for someone to turn down the noise. It remained at the same volume. “Hold on.” There were muffled sounds, then quiet. “That’s better,” he said sheepishly. “The new kids are pretty high energy at the beginning of the semester.”
    “Grad students are always high energy, Chris.” I felt a tiny pang at missing the rush of new classes and new students.
    “You know it. But what about you? What do you need?”
    Chris and I had taken up our faculty positions at Yale in the same year, and he wasn’t supposed to get tenure either. He’d beaten me to it by a year, picking up a MacArthur Fellowship along the way for his brilliant work as a molecular biologist.
    He didn’t behave like an aloof genius when I cold-called him to ask why an alchemist might describe two substances heated in an alembic as growing branches like a tree. Nobody else in the chemistry department had been interested in helping me, but Chris sent two Ph.D. students to get the materials necessary to re-create the experiment, then insisted I come straight to the lab. We’d watched through the walls of a glass beaker while a lump of gray sludge underwent a glorious evolution into a red tree with hundreds of branches. We’d been