Diana goes up to Matthew’s study, and Marthe has already laid out food and lit candles and done all the basic servant-y stuff.  And I can’t believe I haven’t complained about this once already.  Marthe is the only nice female character we see besides Diana.  But it goes further than that: she’s not just nice, she’s servile.  She’s also (physically) in her mid-60s, unlike the ‘mean’ Ysabeau who’s in her early 20s.  Her aunts are sorta-nice, but also gay and in a different country.

Basically, once again, females are separated into two groups: the non-sexually available ones (according to convention) are nice, calm, and helpful; the sexually available ones are a threat and mean, hostile, and antagonistic.  The whole thing is divided along sex lines, and it depicts a world where women are in constant competition against each other.  The only way they could possibly be friends is if they aren’t ‘fighting’ for the same thing.  And that’s just so depressing on so many levels.

Diana goes snooping through Matthew’s things and everything reminds her of him.  He’s out of the country, but heaven forbid we go a single page without someone talking about Gary Stu.  It’s not like the book can cover anything but him, after all.  She decides that she’s justified in snooping through his things, because he did it to her.

No, Diana.  He was a jerk when he did that, and you’re a jerk when you do it.  Doing the same things as a jerk does not make you better than the jerk, it makes on the same level as him.  As we learned in THG, the morality of an act is not based on the receiver.  Things are not bad or good based on who they’re done to, they just are bad or good.  And snooping through someone else’s private files without cause is bad.  Save that shit for when you have probable cause.

She finds a secret drawer with some seals in them (of the ‘stamp it into wax to make a document official’ variety), and one of them appears to be from some…I don’t know, secret order of vampires?  The iconography centered around Lazarus, and really book?  You’re going to go there?  Take one Jesus’s miracles and say “nope, a vampire did it”?  Well, you’ve only insulted two religions before now, I guess you figured you weren’t meeting your quota.

She figures out that the Knights of Lazarus are still active and Matthew is their leader.  But she can’t believe this, because “Knights in shining armor belonged to the past. They weren’t active today.”  Man, you’ve got a really narrow definition of ‘knight’ don’t you? 

Anyway, though Diana proceeds to flip her shit over this discovery, I’m distinctly underwhelmed.  Namely because secret organizations aren’t anything new, and for all we know, these Knights don’t do anything but sit around talking about the good old days when they could legally subjugate women and shit.  So he belongs to a vampire club, so what?  There is absolutely no context or meaning to this discovery, so no reason to freak out over it.

She goes poking through his stuff (giving us the full list of his possessions, as if that’s important) and then muses on for a while about the Templars.  As if they are the first and final word on chivalric orders.

Hey, Diana!  Guess what?  I found a list of currently active orders.  Some have been around since the Middle Ages.  Quit going on and on like it’s such a huge mystery that one might still exist.  The only conspiracy theory going on is the involvement of vampires. 

*looks more on wiki*  Oh for– the Templars aren’t even a chivalric order!  They were a military order!  Chivalric orders came later, and mostly imitated the military ones but without as much combat and shit.  Did you just mix up your terms?  Or were you so distracted by faping over conspiracy theories that you forgot to proofread?

She goes further snooping for his financial records, hoping to find out more about his Knights, and uses magic to get the books down from the shelf.

There was no time to waste on climbing to retrieve it.

Because…um, do you know something we don’t know, Diana?  Is someone about to burst down the castle door and demand answers?  Are you about to leave France and lose access to this study?  Anything?

So she looks through the money ledgers and finds out that Matthew’s Knights have basically been ruling the world, influencing nearly every major historical event that the author could think of off the top of her head.  Because of course.  After all, Matthew wasn’t special enough just by being wealthy and intelligent and famous.  Nope.  He’s got to basically be king of the planet, too.

Oh, yeah, and they basically absorbed the Knights Templar, because why not?

Seriously, where did this plot come from?  This is a huge conspiracy theory bombshell that got dropped on us all in the space of one chapter.  There was no lead-in and no need for it.  It doesn’t flow logically out of the previous chapters, there’s nothing about it that makes us say “oh, so that’s what was going on.”  It’s just a tumor dropped into the middle of the book with no explanation, derailing us further from the plot we opened with.

Remember that plot?  The one with the magic book and finding out why creatures are getting weaker every generation?  It’s getting crowded out by all this other bullshit.  It’s almost like the author just got bored and decided to start writing in a different direction, figuring she could tie it all together at the end somehow.

As for conspiracy theories, their chief weakness was that they were so complex. No lifetime was sufficient to gather the necessary information, build the links between all the required elements, and then set the plans in motion. Unless, of course, the conspirators were vampires.

…or unless you have multiple generations working on something.  Which is perfectly possible.  Or do you think that the US legal system is impossible ‘because it’s so complex, no one could set that up in a single lifetime!’

Idiot.

Later that night, Matthew calls to say he’s on his way home and that he loves her.  Oh, great, so it’s time for more romance.  Because we didn’t get enough of that while he was away or anything.