Shadow of Night

I finished A Discovery of Witches with that timewalk gasp and ordered Shadow of Night the same night. I needed to know if Diana could survive 1590. Deborah Harkness published it in 2012 with Viking, a 592-page second volume with ISBN 9780670023486. It is All Souls book two, set mostly in Elizabethan London and Prague, with a late return to Sept-Tours in the present. I read it slower than the first, in a week of short evenings, because there is so much company on every page. That crowded feeling is both the fun and the flaw.

The setup picks up seconds after book one. Diana Bishop, American historian and reluctant witch, has just learned she can timewalk. Matthew Clairmont, her vampire husband and geneticist, is hunted in the present with her by the Congregation for breaking the law against mingling between species. They hold Ashmole 782 in memory but cannot open it. The plan is blunt. Hide in the past where the Congregation is weaker, find a witch who can teach Diana to control power she was taught to block, track the manuscript when it was whole, and stay out of trouble until Diana can carry them home. Trouble finds them by page fifty.

Timewalking costs. Diana yanks them back to London in November 1590 and lands hard, sick and bleeding, in a Blackfriars house Matthew kept for his other life. He was someone else then. A trusted man of Queen and court, a killer and diplomat who ran spies, moved money, and kept order for his father Philippe de Clermont. Diana arrives with modern teeth, modern speech, modern ideas about marriage, and no immunity to sixteenth century filth. She throws up. She stares. She tries to curtsy. Matthew tries to pass her off as a widowed gentlewoman under his protection. Nobody fully buys it, which drives half the plot.

The house fills fast. Pierre, Matthew's loyal servant, runs the rooms with sharp efficiency and open suspicion of the strange wife. A boy called Jack, feral and bright, steals in from the streets and stays as errand runner, then as something like a son to Diana. She feeds him. She teaches him letters. Those small domestic scenes gave me more pleasure than court scenes.

The School of Night in London

Matthew's circle calls itself the School of Night, and Harkness writes it with historian glee. Christopher Marlowe struts through, brilliant and reckless, writing Tamburlaine by day and carrying knives by night. Thomas Harriot measures stars and tides with quiet patience. Walter Raleigh spends favor and loses it. George Chapman translates and sulks. Henry Percy broods. They drink hard, argue about atoms and souls, spy for the Queen, and suspect Diana at once. Is she a spy for Cecil. Is she Matthew's whore. Is she a witch who will bring searchers down on them all.

Marlowe is the live wire. He loves Matthew with messy loyalty and hates Diana for taking him. Their fights crackle. He mocks her accent. She mocks his Latin. He tries to seduce information out of servants. She catches him and tells him to stop. Under the posturing he is scared. He knows Matthew kills when cornered. He knows the Queen's men watch Catholics and atheists with equal hunger. When Marlowe learns what Diana is, his reaction mixes awe and fear in a way that felt true to a poet who lived close to informers. I winced at his slurs and his needling, then felt sick later knowing his real death waits just past the book's edge. Harkness does not milk that. She lets it sit.

Harriot became my favorite. He shows Diana tide tables and charts that try to map a world getting larger by ship. He treats her as a mind, not a wife. A scene where he lets her look through his papers and asks what she sees of numbers as language stayed with me. Diana, a historian of alchemy, recognizes men trying to separate science from magic while still paying astrologers. She holds her tongue when she must and corrects dates when she can get away with it. Say too much about the future and you change it. Say too little and you look dull.

The spy work is constant. Letters in cipher. Money moved through goldsmiths. Matthew plays both sides to protect Diana, promising the Queen loyalty while hiding a witch in his attic. Diana learns to seal letters and to keep her wedding ring hidden because its make is wrong for the year. One close call at court, when her gloves come off, had my heart fast.

Goody Alsop teaches control

The strongest chapters belong to Goody Alsop and her coven in London. Diana needs training. Her power comes in bursts that scare her. Blue witchfire when afraid. Wind when angry. Knots in her back that hold blocked magic from childhood, tied by her parents to protect her. Goody Alsop, an aging leader with kind eyes and iron will, agrees to teach her with two helpers, Susanna Norman and Elizabeth Jackson. The price is honesty. Tell us what you fear. Show us your knots. Let us touch your past.

Training scenes avoid pop magic. No wands. Breath. Walking. Naming. Remembering. Goody Alsop has Diana spin thread while talking about her mother, then asks her to call fire to light a candle without burning the house. Diana fails for weeks. She sweats. She cries. She wants a spell to memorize, and the women laugh gently. Power here lives in body and grief as much as words. One lesson in a cold church, where Diana must stand still while the women sing and pull at her knots with voice and touch, left me holding my breath. Harkness writes the release as pain and relief together, like a joint set back in place.

Susanna brings herbs and midwife sense. She checks Diana for pregnancy signs with blunt questions that embarrass the modern woman. Elizabeth brings fear, because her own power drew hunters and she bears scars to prove it. Their coven is not cozy. Informers watch. Neighbors count loaves and whisper about women who live without men. A raid scare forces them to move a lesson to a cellar, and Diana sees how fast help turns to risk. That danger grounds the magic. Every new skill raises her scent to those who hunt witches for law or profit.

What I valued is how training changes Diana's marriage. She stops asking Matthew to fix her power. She practices alone at dawn while he sleeps after night work. She keeps secrets about her knots because Goody Alsop tells her some work belongs only to witches. Matthew hates that. He paces. He demands to watch. Diana tells him no, and means it. Their love, sealed fast in book one by vampire custom, gets tested here by separate growth. It felt adult. Two people learning to allow closed doors.

Hunting Ashmole 782 at Mortlake

The manuscript hunt gives the middle its spine. In 1590 Ashmole 782 is whole, or closer to whole, and Diana remembers its call from the Bodleian. She and Matthew trace rumors to John Dee at Mortlake, scholar and astrologer to the Queen, keeper of a famous library that mixes math, angels, and alchemy without shame. Dee receives them with courtesy and calculation. He shows books. He asks about Diana's family. He lets her touch volumes that should not exist in one room. The library scenes sing for anyone who loves old paper. Dust. Chains. Marginal notes in three hands. A diagram that looks like both a spell and a cell.

Diana finds traces but not answers. Pages missing. A tree drawn with roots that shift when witches look. A note about origins that matches Matthew's genetic questions in the present. Harkness keeps the book coy, which frustrated me on purpose. You want Diana to grab it and run. She cannot. Taking it would break time. Reading it fully would mark her. Dee, for all his welcome, serves powers of his own and reports what he sees. A tense dinner where Dee asks Matthew about France while watching Diana's hands taught me more about evasive talk than any spy chapter.

The search widens to Prague and the court of Emperor Rudolf, a collector who hoards art and strange books. Matthew must go for politics. Diana must go because only she can sense the manuscript. The journey is cold and cramped. Bad roads. Sour beer. Guards who take coins and still sneer. Rudolf's court is vivid and queasy, all clocks and lions. Diana meets the emperor in a room full of wonders and keeps her head by thinking of Goody Alsop's breathing lessons. She senses pages near but cannot reach them without trade she will not pay. I liked that restraint.

Back in London, the hunt turns inward. Diana learns her own family left marks in the past. Her father had been there. Names she thought safe appear in parish lists. That discovery reframes the trip. They did not only flee to hide. They were sent, or called, by blood. A scene where Diana finds a signature she knows in a stranger's book gave me chills. Time is not a hiding place here. It is a snare with family bait.

Matthew past and present strain

This is Matthew's book as much as Diana's, and his past is ugly. In 1590 he is not the controlled Oxford scientist. He is a man who kills on order, who keeps a hard house, who answers Philippe with obedience edged in hate. Diana watches him beat a man for threatening Jack and sees joy in it that frightens her. She confronts him in their bedchamber, still in stays and sweat, and asks who he is when she is not watching. He has no clean answer. His confessions come in pieces. Wars. Orders. A brother dead badly. Blood rage that takes vampires into frenzy where they harm those they love. He fears he carries it. He fears Diana will see it and leave.

Philippe de Clermont dominates the French chapters. Matthew's vampire father runs Sept-Tours in the past as fortress and court. He receives Diana with piercing interest, tests her with questions about loyalty, and offers protection at a price. Obey house law. Bear scrutiny. Philippe and Diana fence over wine and maps, and she holds her own by refusing to flatter. He respects spine. He also reminds Matthew he is still a son under command. I enjoyed Philippe even when he chilled me. He loves his family as a king loves a country, which is to say with limits.

Marriage strain feels honest. Diana is pregnant by the later chapters, though she does not know it at first, and her magic shifts with her body. She is tired. She snaps. Matthew hovers and drinks. He keeps secrets about his orders to keep her safe, which makes her less safe because she cannot plan around what she does not know. A fight in a Paris courtyard, where Diana tells him she did not timewalk to trade one prison for older walls, hit hard because both are right. Her refusal to let him attend a coven rite shows new muscle. Softer beats, like him washing her feet after a long ride, show why the muscle aches to use.

Ysabeau appears in past form too, cooler and more distant than the mother Diana knew in the present. Diana wants comfort. Ysabeau offers rules. Only late, when Diana bleeds for the family and refuses to betray a witch friend, does Ysabeau soften a fraction. That slow thaw mirrors book one but with less warmth, which fits.

Return to Sept-Tours and fair criticism

The last movement returns to present Sept-Tours with new wounds and new knowledge. I will not spoil the mechanics of how they get home, except to say it costs and it scares. Home brings Miriam and Marcus, lab talk, modern showers, and the shock of how fast comfort feels strange after chamber pots. Diana carries twins, a fact revealed with care rather than fanfare, and the knowledge that Ashmole hunts them still. Knox still schemes. Gerbert still waits. The book closes not with victory but with a household bracing.

Now fair criticism, because this 592-page middle sags in places despite its pleasures. It is overstuffed. Harkness loves research and shows it. Some chapters read like a tour led by a fond guide who will not skip a church. Readers who want the tight Oxford chase of book one may fidget through Prague politics and long letters. I skimmed two council scenes and felt no loss.

Secondary figures overload the middle. The School needs its members, the coven needs its women, the courts need their queens and emperors. Names pile. Keeping them straight took notes. A slimmer cast would have let Diana breathe.

Pacing slows where training repeats. Diana fails to call fire, then fails again, then talks about failing. The point about patience is sound, but three similar lessons in a row test patience in the wrong way. The manuscript hunt also teases more than it delivers, which is honest for a middle book but still leaves a hunger that 592 pages should have fed a bit more.

What holds redeems much. London smells and sounds true without turning into a costume parade. Female friendship among witches gives Diana what Matthew cannot. Marriage is tested with specifics, not abstractions. Jack's arc alone justifies the length for me. A starved boy learning letters while empires move around him reminds you what big history costs small bodies.

Who should pick it up. Readers who loved book one for scholarship and slow burn will feel fed. History lovers who know Marlowe and Dee will catch jokes and shiver at fates. Skip or skim if you need lean thriller pace or dislike long historical detours. This is All Souls book two in truth, a bridge that widens the world and strains the couple so book three can test them. Keep a list of names. Let Goody Alsop's lessons settle. The fire comes, just slower than you want.