The London of Clockwork Angel is, as much as I could make it, an admixture of the real and the unreal, the famous and the forgotten. The geography of real Victorian London is preserved as much as possible, but there were times that wasn’t possible. For those wondering about the Institute: There was indeed a church called All-Hallows-the-Less that burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666; it was located, however, in Upper Thames Street, not where I have placed it, just off Fleet Street. Those familiar with London will recognize the location of the Institute, and the shape of its spire, as that of the famous St. Bride’s Church, beloved of newspapermen and journalists, which goes unmentioned in Clockwork as the Institute has taken its place. There is no Carleton Square in reality, though there is a Carlton Square; Blackfriars Bridge, Hyde Park, the Strand—even Gunther’s ice cream shop—all existed and are presented to the best of my researching abilities. Sometimes I think all cities have a shadow self, where the memory of great events and great places lingers after those places themselves are gone. To that end, there was a Devil Tavern on Fleet Street and Chancery, where Samuel Pepys and Dr. Samuel Johnson drank, but though it was demolished in 1787, I like to think Will can visit its shadow self in 1878.
A NOTE ON THE POETRY
The poetry quotations at the beginning of each chapter are by and large taken from poetry Tessa would be familiar with, either of her era, or a staple from before it. The exceptions are the poems by Wilde and Kipling—still Victorian poets, but dating later than the 1870s—and the poem by Elka Cloke at the beginning of the volume, “Thames River Song,” which was written specifically for this book. A longer version of the poem can be found at the author’s website: ElkaCloke.com.
Acknowledgments
Much thanks for familial support from my mother and father, as well as Jim Hill and Kate Connor; Nao, Tim, David, and Ben; Melanie, Jonathan, and Helen Lewis; Florence and Joyce. To those who read and critiqued and pointed out anachronisms—Clary, Eve Sinaiko, Sarah Smith, Delia Sherman, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Justine Larbalestier—tons of thanks. And thanks to those whose smiling faces and snarky remarks keep me going another day: Elka Cloke, Holly Black, Robin Wasserman, Maureen Johnson, Libba Bray, and Sarah Rees Brennan. Thanks to Margie Longoria for her support of Project Book Babe. Thanks to Lisa Gold: Research Maven (http://lisagoldresearch.wordpress.com) for her help in digging up hard-to-find primary sources. My always-gratitude to my agent, Barry Goldblatt; my editor, Karen Wojtyla; and the teams at Simon & Schuster and Walker Books for making it all happen. And lastly, my thanks to Josh, who did a lot of laundry while I was doing revisions on this book, and only complained some of the time.
A SHORT STORY SET DURING CITY OF BONES
MAGNUS’S VOW
Magnus Bane lay on the floor of his Brooklyn loft, looking up at the bare ceiling. The floor was slightly sticky, as was much else in the apartment. Spilled faery wine mixed with blood on the floor, running in rivulets across the splintery floorboards. The bar, which had been a door laid across two dented metal garbage cans, had gotten wrecked at some point during the night during a lively fight between a vampire and Bat, one of the downtown werewolf pack. Magnus felt satisfied. It wasn’t a good party unless something got broken.
Soft footsteps padded across the floor toward him and then something crawled onto his chest: something small, soft, and heavy. He looked up and found himself staring into a pair of wide gold-green eyes that matched his own. Chairman Meow.
He stroked the cat, who kneaded his claws happily into Magnus’s shirt. A bit of Silly String fell from the ceiling and landed on both of them, causing Chairman Meow to leap sideways.
With a yawn, Magnus sat up. He usually felt like this after a party—tired but too wound up to sleep. His mind was humming over the events of the evening, but like a scratched CD, it kept coming back to the same point and spinning there, sending his memories into a whirl.
Those Shadowhunter children. He hadn’t been surprised that Clarissa had finally tracked him down; he’d known Jocelyn’s stopgap memory spells wouldn’t work forever. He’d told her as much, but she’d been determined to protect the girl as long as she could. Now that he’d met her, conscious and alert, he wondered if she’d really needed all that protecting. She was fiery, impulsive, brave—and lucky, like her mother.
That was if you believed in luck. But something must have led her to the Shadowhunters of the Institute, possibly the only ones who could protect her from Valentine. A pity that Maryse and Robert were gone. He’d dealt with Maryse more than once, but it had been years since he’d seen the younger generation.
He had a vague memory of visiting Maryse and Hodge, and there being two boys in the hallway, about eleven years old, battling back and forth with harmless model seraph blades. A girl with black hair in two braids had been watching them and vociferously complaining about not being included. He had taken very little note of them at the time.
But now—seeing them had shaken him, especially the boys, Jace and Alec. When you had so many memories, sometimes it was hard to identify the exact one you wanted, like flipping through a ten-thousand page book to find the correct paragraph.
This time, however, he knew.
He crawled across the splintery floor and knelt to open the closet door. Inside, he pushed aside clothes and various packets and potions, feeling along the walls for what he wanted. When he emerged, coughing on dust balls, he was dragging a decent-sized wooden trunk. Though he had lived a long time, he tended to travel light: to keep very few mementos of his past. He sensed somehow that they would weigh him down, keep him from moving forward. When you lived forever, you could spend only so much time looking back.
It had been so long since he’d unlocked the trunk, it came open with a squeal of hinges that sent Chairman Meow skittering under the sofa, his tail twitching.
The heap of objects inside the trunk looked like the hoard of an unfastidious dragon. Some objects gleamed with metal and gems—Magnus drew out an old snuffbox with the initials WS picked out across the top in winking rubies, and grinned at the bad taste of the thing, and also at the memories it evoked. Others seemed unremarkable: a faded, cream-colored silk ribbon that had been Camille’s; a matchbook from the Cloud Club with the words I know what you are written on the inside cover in a lady’s hand; a limerick signed OFOWW; a half-burned piece of stationery from the Hong Kong Club—a place he had been barred from not for being a warlock, but for not being white. He touched a piece of twisted rope nearly at the bottom of the pile, and thought of his mother. She had been the daughter of a Dutch colonialist man and an Indonesian woman who had died in childbirth and whose name Magnus had never known.
He was almost at the bottom of the trunk when he found what he was looking for and drew it out, squinting: a black-and-white paper photograph mounted on hard cardboard. An object that really shouldn’t have existed, and wouldn’t if Henry had not been obsessed with photography. Magnus could picture him now, ducking in and out from beneath his photographer’s hood, racing with the wet plates to the darkroom he’d set up in the crypt to develop the film, shouting at his photographic subjects to keep still. Those were the days when in order to render an accurate photograph, one had to remain motionless for minutes at a time. Not easy, Magnus thought, the corner of his mouth flicking up, for the crew of the London Institute.