Shadow of Night

Kit and Louisa tie Diana to a stake. She feels her firedrake familiar stirring in her chest and remembers when she was young, and she told her father about a “dragon” that lived inside of her. They begin to tilt, using Diana as a target, but her magic frees her and cows them. Annie, Pierre, Walter, and Matthew arrive. Matthew says he is not enchanted; Diana is his mate and is pregnant with his child. Louisa tries to persuade Matthew that Diana is a witch foretold in prophecy, whose child will bring about the end of the de Clermonts. Matthew orders Louisa and Kit to be imprisoned.

Later, Diana and Annie spot Hubbard while doing errands; he has heard rumors that Diana is pregnant with Matthew’s child. He says that Matthew is at Bedlam, where he’s detained Kit and Louisa and is torturing them for information. Diana goes to Bedlam, observing with horror the conditions in which inmates are kept. She enters Kit and Louisa’s cell; Matthew is in a blood rage and is torturing them. He’s been drinking Kit’s blood, and since Kit takes opiates, Matthew experiences their effects.

Diana talks Matthew down from his rage and convinces him to turn Kit over to Hubbard and Louisa to Gallowglass. They realize they need to go back to their own time, and they begin preparing. When walking through St. Paul’s Churchyard one day, Diana sees a man who looks like her father.

Stephen timewalked from a different point in the future, when Diana was a young girl in 1980. He tells Matthew and Diana he’s “just hanging out” in the past (519) but she suspects he’s looking for the Ashmole manuscript. Over the following days, Stephen stays with them. Diana is distressed that Stephan acts awkwardly around her, but Matthew says he’s just overwhelmed.

Later, when Stephen is looking at the Ashmole manuscript, he asks Diana to tell him what happened when she found it in the Bodleian. With his weaver’s ability, he can see tangled threads connecting her and the book. She tells him about the events included in A Discovery of Witches and explains why she and Matthew need the book: Creatures are disappearing, witches have trouble reproducing, and vampires have failed resurrections. They hope the genetic information in the book can help them.

She tells her father she’s pregnant, but he already knows. Diana’s mother, Rebecca, saw Diana’s future with her “uncanny sight” (523). Later, when Stephen talks to Matthew and Diana, he gently scolds them for leaving so many marks on the past. He says they cannot take Ashmole 782 back to the future, as they’ve already made a “mess” that will follow them back to their own time.

Diana takes her father to meet Goody Alsop and the gathering. Stephen lets out his familiar, a heron named Bennu, and urges Diana not to fear her own power. Stephen coaches Diana on how to call on her elements like he calls on water. Her firedrake frees itself and finally introduces herself as Corra.

After two weeks in the past, Stephen plans to leave after the Midsummer holiday. He leaves Diana and Matthew to visit Shakespeare and the local witches. Diana and Matthew walk to parts of the city Diana hasn’t seen. They climb to the top of All Hallows the Great, from which they can see the entire city. Diana reflects on all the things she has done since traveling back in time.

When Diana wakes up the next morning, Stephen is already gone. Diana is hurt he didn’t say goodbye, but Matthew sympathizes with a parent not wanting to say a “final goodbye” to their child. Gallowglass gives Diana a note her father left her. It is a heartfelt note about how he will live on through her children.

Diana visits Goody Alsop to say goodbye. She tells her that Matthew convinced the Congregation to intervene and save the witches being persecuted in Scotland. She has Goody Alsop check the magical knots she wove to return them to the future. Goody Alsop wants to teach Diana a final knot. Though neither she nor her own teacher could make the knot, they passed its knowledge down, waiting for one who could. It is an endless knot, symbolizing the power of eternity, life, and death.

Diana then goes to Hubbard, offering him money to take care of Annie and Jack. He already sees Annie as his ward but won’t agree to look after Jack unless Diana gives him her blood. Since vampires can use blood to read people’s memories, Diana agrees to give him one drop.

Back at home, Diana overhears Thomas Harriot muse about what would become of the telescope. She knows that Thomas would never publish his ideas, and the credit for subsequent inventions and discoveries would go elsewhere. She offers to help him find a long gun barrel to create the body of his telescope. 

On her errands, Diana sees a little girl who looks like a combination of her mother and her aunt Sarah. When she hears the girl and her mother’s name, she knows from her family grimoire that the girl will be the grandmother of the first Bishop witch, Bridget Bishop. Diana thinks about the objects she used to go back in time. One was Ysabeau’s old earring, hidden in Bridget Bishop’s poppet. Diana takes off one of the earrings, which she is wearing, and gives it to the girl, Rebecca.

At home, Diana gives the gun barrel to Thomas. She had it engraved with his name and the year he invented it. The School of Night gathers to look at the moon. Afterward, they all disperse, Annie leaving with Susanna and Goody Alsop, and Jack leaving with Henry and Thomas. Diana and Matthew get their final affairs in order and timewalk to the future.

In the present day, Ysabeau reads a news article about a discovery of a spyglass invented by Thomas Harriot. The discovery is so massive that history books will “have to be rewritten” (555). Marcus tries to buy it, but its owners won’t sell it. Marcus has started dating Phoebe, the woman he bought the miniatures from. She now knows about Matthew, Diana, and the existence of creatures. 

Marcus has started a “Conventicle”: a mixture of humans, vampires, witches, and daemons who want to live integrated lives. They have many new residents at Sept-Tours, including Sarah, whose partner, Emily, was killed while saving the witch daughter of two daemons, Diana’s friends Sophie and Nathaniel.

Diana and Matthew land in the Bishop house. It is empty, and the calendar displays November of last year. Diana thinks something is wrong, but they can’t use the phones, which are likely tapped by the Congregation. They find their passports in Sarah’s car and begin the journey to Sept-Tours.

Sarah, Ysabeau, and Sophie are waiting for them when they arrive. Diana is introduced to Sophie’s baby, Margaret. Diana asks where Emily is, but Sarah avoids her question. Ysabeau hears two heart beats in Diana’s womb and begins crying, both because Diana and Matthew have conceived, and because she is pregnant with twins.

In May 1593, after Kit’s death, Annie brings a chess piece belonging to Kit to Hubbard. Diana originally used the piece to go back in time. Kit won the piece from her in a game and gave it to Annie in his last will. Hubbard lets her keep it. Hubbard is also in possession of one of the three pages Kelly took from the Ashmole manuscript. Hubbard says he’s found Annie a new employer, Will Shakespeare.

At Shakespeare’s, a paper Kit hid in the chess piece slips out, and Shakespeare reads it. It is a three-line poem about lost love and the “Shadow of Night,” which Shakespeare does not know is Matthew. Shakespeare edits the lines into something about the “School of Night,” lines that would eventually become famous in Love’s Labour’s Lost.