#adows1e7

Tuesday, October 13

Travels, memories and revelations.

It’s still dark outside as Matthew, Diana and Baldwin leave France for New York on a private jet. Diana is heavily medicated on morphine and spends most of the trip sleeping. After landing, Baldwin leaves them with some advice ““What happened at La Pierre feels like a gambit to me,” Baldwin continued, his eyes never wavering. “The Congregation let you go for some reason of their own. Make your next move before they make theirs. Don’t wait your turn like a good girl, and don’t be duped into thinking your current freedom means you’re safe. Decide what to do to survive, and do it.””

Matthew and Diana continue by car to Madison. They arrive to an empty house as the house needs time to make its mind up on Matthew according to Sarah. It’s a haunted house where dead Bishops co-exist with the living. Tabitha, the family cat, takes an unexpected liking to Matthew.

When Sarah and Emily come back home, they are horrified by Diana’s condition and Sarah insists on using magic to heal her wounds. Matthew is very impressed with her knowledge and an exhausted Diana takes a nap after almost using witchfire on her aunt Sarah to protect Matthew’s secrets. She wakes, hearing Matthew and the aunts discuss her being spellbound, something that terrifies her hearing as only dangerous and insane witches are spellbound.

Diana leaves and Matthew finds her in the woods. He makes her understand that there’s nothing wrong with her, her parents feared the Congregation and did the only thing they could think of to keep her safe. Diana understands that her bedtime stories were in fact the story of what was done to her and she remembers Knox visiting when she was a child, touching her head.

“Alchemy is woven into every aspect of the All Souls story from the very beginning, even down to the timings. The action of A Discovery of Witches takes place over forty days and is purposely structured to mirror the forty days of an alchemical experiment. Forty was a significant number in alchemy, as Mary Sidney pointed out to Diana when they were working in her laboratory. Mary was delighted when her own experiment with the arbor Dianae took exactly forty days to complete, ‘just as the sages promised.’”