The Last Hours: Chain of Iron, page 19
In the kitchen, Cordelia saw with a touch of homesickness that the desserts had already been laid out on a silver tray: sweet sohan assali, and chunks of fried zoolbia bamieh soaked in rose syrup. She came up behind her mother and gently laid an arm about Sona’s shoulders, the silk sleeve of her lace-and-chiffon tea gown fluttering gently. “Mâmân,” she insisted. “You shouldn’t be on your feet so much.”
Sona ignored this and gave a look in the direction of the dining room. “James and your father seem to be getting along.”
Cordelia made an impatient noise. “Father’s rewriting what happened. Every time he tells that story it gets more elaborate and he gets more heroic.”
Sona added a bit of water to the red-brown tea in the pot and eyed it critically. “We’re all allowed to embroider stories a bit. It’s harmless.” She turned to Cordelia. “Layla,” she added, her voice softening, “so much has changed so quickly. You and your brother must give him a chance.”
“But don’t you wonder where he was all those days? He was released from the Basilias and instead of coming home he just … wandered around?”
Sona sighed. “He’s told me all about his travels. If you want to know about them, you could simply ask him yourself. Honestly, it saddens me to think how much he put himself through—but I believe the experience has changed him for the better. What he has survived has made him whole again.”
Cordelia wished she could believe it. Whatever her mother saw in her father since his return, Cordelia was blind to it. He seemed the same as he had always been—and now that she knew that all that time he had been drunk, or hungover from being drunk, rather than chronically ill, the sympathy she’d felt for him seemed like a cruel trick he’d played. She didn’t want to be like her mother—telling herself a story that made it all right, when it obviously wasn’t. But she also didn’t want to be like Alastair, angry all the time, unable to make peace with the reality of who their father was, butting his head against it over and over, though it would never budge.
Cordelia picked up the tray of desserts and carried it into the dining room. James was laughing. Alastair made eye contact with her, and she could decode the complexities of his look perfectly well: he thought he knew exactly what they had been discussing in the kitchen, and she was sure he was correct.
Fortunately, everyone managed to get through dessert with no further discord. Sona excused herself, saying she was tired, and seeing that her father was fading quickly himself, Cordelia announced that they too should be going, as the hour had grown late.
This left Alastair to see them out. He went with Cordelia into the vestibule as James, faultlessly polite as always, lingered to thank Elias for the evening.
“Well, he was in rare form tonight,” Alastair said with disgust.
Cordelia had no need to ask who “he” was. “It’s so different,” she said as Alastair helped her on with her coat. “Spending time with him, knowing he’s … he’s not ill at all. Was it always like this for—”
She broke off as James appeared, pausing to retrieve his coat and gloves. He took one look at Cordelia and Alastair and said, “I’ll just step outside. I need a breath of fresh air, and to check on Xanthos.”
Cordelia knew perfectly well that it was freezing outside and that Xanthos was probably asleep, but she appreciated that James was leaving her a moment to talk to Alastair alone. After James slipped out, she reached up to pat her brother’s cheek. “Alastair, dâdâsh,” she said. “Are you all right? If you ever want to stay at Curzon Street—”
“With you and James?” Alastair raised an eyebrow, glancing out the window. Cordelia could see James standing by the snowy curb, stroking Xanthos’s nose. “I was worried that he would never move on from Miss Blackthorn. But from all appearances, he seems not to be moping.”
It was a relief to be able to talk about it out loud. “I don’t know—when he saw her at Rosamund’s party, he looked as if he were going to be ill.”
“That doesn’t signify. Whenever I see Charles, I feel like I’m going to be ill. But that doesn’t mean I still … Contrary to what your beloved poets say, unrequited love doesn’t last forever. And being treated badly by someone doesn’t make you love them more.”
“Alastair,” she said softly. “I don’t regret my marriage, but there is a part of me that feels terrible for leaving you alone just as Father came back. Is every night as awkward as this one?”
Alastair shook his head. “Never feel that way, Layla. One of the things that makes all this”—he gestured, as if to encompass the whole living situation at Cornwall Gardens—“livable for me is knowing that you aren’t here, having to endure his moods and his demands and his very selective amnesia.” He smiled. “And maybe it’s selfish of me, but now that you know the truth, and I can speak of it to someone, it is an easier burden to bear than I would have imagined.”
It was late when Lucie left Anna’s party. She had spent a restless evening there, unable to lose herself in the champagne or the conversation. She kept looking toward the windows, watching the fat white flakes of snow come down and wondering how cold it had grown tonight in a roofless shed in Chiswick.
She knew that Jesse didn’t care. Couldn’t feel the cold. She worried, nonetheless.
Finally she had given up and headed home among cries for her to stay and join another round of games and chatter. Despite her vow to conquer the Enclave, Filomena had spent most of the night in animated conversation with a vampire who shared her admiration for the art nouveau movement sweeping through Europe. After Filomena promised she would find someone to see her safely home, Lucie had maneuvered her way through the room—someone had turned a table over, and people were using it as an impromptu dance floor—toward Matthew, meaning to ask him to take her home in his carriage.
He had smiled at her, then stumbled and nearly knocked over Percival, Anna’s stuffed snake. He was obviously drunk, and Lucie preferred her own company to that of an inebriated Matthew, which hurt her heart and made her want to shake him and ask him why he couldn’t treat himself better. Why he couldn’t see himself the way her brother saw him. Why he was so determined to harm himself and harm James in the process.
As Lucie made her way down Percy Street, a few snowflakes chased each other lazily in the glow of the gaslights, the streets empty and quiet at this hour. London wrapped in snow was a hushed promise of a city, gas lamps strung like a chain of pearls across the sky. Lucie snuggled deeper into her astrakhan coat. At her waist clinked the daggers and seraph blades she’d brought with her tonight. One could never be too careful.
After walking a few blocks, she took out her gloves. She had to admit it was cold, despite the heat rune she’d put on before she left the party. It had been awfully warm inside Anna’s apartment, and as the evening wore on, things had become ever more riotous as the crowd danced and drank and flirted, Anna perched atop the soundboard of the piano, watching them all with her La Gioconda smile. Thomas’s sister Eugenia had danced with Matthew, tossing her long dark hair. At one point Lucie talked briefly to a wide-eyed mundane girl who proclaimed the party the wildest she’d ever attended, and asked Lucie in a rather astonished tone if everyone present were bohemians.
Lucie considered replying that they weren’t bohemians, they were vampires, werewolves, and demon hunters, but she didn’t want to shock the poor girl to death. “Yes,” she’d said. “Bohemians.”
“Goodness,” the girl had exclaimed. Later Lucie saw her kissing Anna in a window seat and decided the bohemian lifestyle must have grown on her.
The snow began coming down harder as Lucie passed the silent, deserted bulk of the British Museum. It gleamed palely behind its railings, the stately columns of its entrance frosted all over with a thin layer of ice. A tickle started at the base of her spine. The feeling of being watched. Her breath puffed out in a cold white cloud as she spun around, her hand going to a dagger at her waist.
He was there, a dark shape against a background of white snow and ice-frosted buildings. The snow fell all around him but did not touch him—not his dark hair, or his perennial costume of white shirt and black trousers.
“You startled me!” she cried, her heart pounding.
Jesse smiled thinly. “Well, I am a ghost. I could have jumped out from behind the museum and shouted ‘boo,’ but I restrained myself.”
She had begun to shiver. “I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”
“I never said that.” It was as if he stood beneath a shield of glass, she thought, the snow drifting away from him as though he and the space he occupied were not really there. His eyes, though, were as keen and thoughtful as ever. “In fact, I was curious as to how Princess Lucinda and Lord Jethro were getting along.”
Without looking at him, Lucie started off at a brisk walk. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I wasn’t,” he said mildly, joining her as they made their way down High Holborn, picking through slush churned up by the last few home-bound carriages, and turned down Chancery Lane. There was no traffic at all here; the silent pavements sparkled with a white, fragile layer of snow. “I’d just like to see you for a bit.”
Lucie rubbed her hands together. They were cold even through the gloves. “I can’t imagine why. You made it very clear how you felt.”
“Did I,” he said in a low voice, and then, “For that, I need to apologize.”
Lucie brightened up. “Oh, well, if there are going to be apologies …”
His green eyes flashed with amusement. “Surely you aren’t out on patrol, dressed like that?”
Lucie looked down at the pale green chiffon peeking from under her coat. “I dressed this way for a party,” she said lightly, “and I went to a party, and now—like a proper young lady—I am being escorted home from a party.”
“Was it a proper party, then?”
“Certainly not! There’s nothing wholly proper about any event hosted by Anna Lightwood. But that’s what makes her parties so good.”
“I’ve never been to a party,” Jesse said. “I would have loved to have attended one of hers.”
“You were at the ball when you first came to London,” Lucie reminded him.
“True. But I couldn’t dance, couldn’t taste the food or the wine.” He cocked his head to the side. “You’re the writer,” he said. “Describe the party to me.”
“Describe it?” They had turned onto St. Bride’s Lane. The neighborhood was smaller, cozier; the snow gave the cobbled streets a fairy-tale feel. Icicles hung from the corners of half-timbered houses, and through leaded glass windowpanes glowing fires could be seen. Lucie put her chin in the air. “I will take your challenge, Jesse Blackthorn. I shall describe tonight’s party to you in such detail, you will feel as though you had been there.”
She launched into a description, painting the scene as if she were writing in her novel. She embroidered on conversations, making them funnier than they had been; she described the taste of everything on offer from the flakiness of the pastries to the fizziness of the punch. She wove a picture of the outrageous polka-dotted cravat Matthew had paired with striped silk trousers and a magenta vest. She remembered that Jesse hadn’t met Filomena, and she told him all about the young Italian girl and her vampiric admirer.
“She’s a very good dancer,” said Lucie. “She taught us a new waltz that she learned in Peru.”
The gates of the Institute rose before them, its spire piercing the clouds overhead. Lucie paused at the gates, turning to Jesse. “Thank you for walking me home. However, I did not hear the apology I was promised. You should not have read my book without asking.”
He leaned against the gatepost. Or at least, he seemed to: Lucie knew that he was insubstantial, and the gatepost solid. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”
There was something about him, she thought; he was the opposite of Matthew, in his way. Matthew put a bright face on every situation, even if it was dreadful. While Jesse spoke directly, never deflecting.
“And you should not have said I thought of you as a joke, or of your situation that way,” she said. “All I want is to help you. To repair this.”
“To repair death?” he said softly. “Lucie. You were wrong in what you said—but only when you claimed you are not like Princess Lucinda. Not brave or resourceful or clever. You are a thousand times those things. You are better than any imagined heroine. You are my heroine.”
Lucie felt herself blush. “Then why—”
“Did I get so angry? It must have seemed to you that I hated the book,” he said, his voice low and rapid, as if he wished to get to the end of what he had to say before his nerve failed him. “Or hated your writing, or hated that character—Jethro—but it was nothing of the sort. If anything, I was jealous of the bastard. His one purpose is to say exactly what he feels.” He looked up at the sky, the snow. “You have to understand that I always, always assumed that you could never feel anything for me. And that is why I thought that it was safe that I felt the way I did about you.”
Lucie stood motionless. She couldn’t have moved had a charging Shax demon suddenly appeared. “What do you mean?” she whispered. “What do you mean, the way you felt?”
He pushed himself away from the wall. He was truly agitated now, she realized, so much so that when he gestured, the movement of his hands seemed to shimmer in the air. It was something she had seen before, when ghosts became desperately upset—not that she wanted to think of Jesse as an ordinary sort of ghost like Jessamine, or Old Mol. “It’s almost a joke,” he said, and the bitterness in his voice surprised her. “A ghost falling in love with a living girl and pining away in a dusty attic while she lives her life. But I could survive that, Lucie. It would just be a tragedy for me.”
A ghost falling in love.
A small flame lit in Lucie’s chest. An ember, the beginning of a blaze. “It’s never a tragedy to love somebody.”
“I think Romeo and Juliet would disagree with you on that.” His voice shook. “And don’t you see? If—if you loved me back, then that is not just a tragedy for one of us; it’s a tragedy for both of us. For there can be no future in it.”
“Jesse,” she said. “Jesse, are you shivering?”
He looked up and around him with a sort of amazement. For a moment she saw the boy who’d saved her in Brocelind Forest when she was a child, the one she’d thought was some sort of changeling prince—pale-skinned and green-eyed. “I think,” he said, in a hushed voice, “that at this moment, perhaps, I am able to feel the wind.”
“See?” She caught hold of his hand; it was neither warm nor cold, but seemed to catch warmth from her own skin, his fingers curling over hers. “We have a future. I promise you we do—”
He stroked his free hand down the side of her cheek. “Command me, Lucie,” he said roughly. “I am asking you: command me to dance with you. Show me this waltz from Peru.”
Very slowly, her eyes never leaving his, Lucie unbuttoned her coat, slipping each circle of leather out of its buttonhole with gloved fingers. At last she stood before him, the coat hanging from her shoulders, the wind plastering the lacy scraps of her dress to her body. Jesse could not seem to look away; she could feel the gold locket at her throat rise and fall with her breath.
“Dance with me, Jesse Blackthorn,” she said. “I command you.”
He reached out, sliding his arms inside her coat, pulling her against him. She laid a palm against his shoulder; his free hand spanned the side of her waist. She fitted her body to his, and color swept into his face, flushing his cheeks. She did not question it. One should not, she felt instinctively, question miracles too closely.
The night was hushed, enchanted. They danced, with only the sound of the softly falling snow as music. It dusted Lucie’s cheeks, her eyelashes. She couldn’t stop looking at Jesse. He was so beautiful, so awfully, terribly beautiful, like a marble carving of an angel—but no carving had such dark, tumbling hair, such secretive eyes. He held her tight against him as they danced, and for the first time she felt his body close to hers, the shape of him, the strength in his arms, the lean hardness of his chest beneath his too-thin shirt.
Her skirt brushed a path in the snow, though when she looked down, she could see only her own footsteps, crisscrossing each other. There was no sign at all of where Jesse had walked. She tipped her head up and found him watching her, his gaze slipping from her eyes to her mouth. It was as if his fingertips brushed her lips, shaping them; his gaze clung, neither of them looking away—
The front door of the Institute slammed in the distance. As if the music had stopped, they stilled, both frozen, gazing toward the courtyard.
“Don’t go,” she whispered—but there were footsteps on the path coming toward them. Reaching out, Jesse plucked a gold comb from Lucie’s hair, closing his hand around it. His eyes burned like stars against the night.
Lucie heard her uncle Gabriel’s voice, calling out her name, and then the rattle of the gate. Turning away, Jesse vanished, melting into the darkness like snow.
James was uncharacteristically quiet when they returned to the house after the dinner party. Cordelia could not help but worry that after a night spent with her family, he was regretting marrying her, even if it was only for a year. Once they’d dispensed with their coats, she thought he might make a break for the stairs, so he could be alone with his thoughts about his bizarre in-laws, but instead he turned to her, his gold eyes unreadable.
“I’m not ready to go to sleep just yet,” he said. “Would you like to join me in the study?”
Definitely. Anything was better than going back to her room alone and worrying she’d horrified James permanently.
The study was snug and cozy as always; Effie had built up the fire, and a plate of chocolate biscuits had been set out on the chess table. Cordelia curled up in a brocade chair beside the hearth, sticking her cold feet and hands out toward the fire like a little girl. James, more decorous as always, sank onto the sofa, looking thoughtful.
