“I am not your Tessa either.”
The light sparkling in his eyes dimmed. “Fair enough,” he said. “I suppose you are not. What is it like, being Jessamine, then? Can you sense her thoughts? Read what she feels?”
Tessa swallowed, and touched the velvet curtain of the carriage with a gloved hand. Outside she could see the gaslights going by in a yellow blur; two children were slumped in a doorway, leaning against each other, asleep. Temple Bar flew by overhead. She said, “I tried. Upstairs in her bedroom. But there’s something wrong. I—I couldn’t feel anything from her.”
“Well, I suppose it’s hard to meddle in someone’s brains if they’ve got no brains to start with.”
Tessa made a face. “Be flippant about it if you like, but there is something wrong with Jessamine. Trying to touch her mind is like trying to touch—a nest of snakes, or a poisonous cloud. I can feel a little of her emotions. A great deal of rage, and longing, and bitterness. But I cannot pick out the individual thoughts among them. It is like trying to hold water.”
“That’s curious. Have you ever come across anything like it before?”
Tessa shook her head. “It concerns me. I am afraid Nate will expect me to know something and I will not know it or have the right answer.”
Will leaned forward. On wet days, which was nearly every day, his normally straight dark hair would begin to curl. There was something about the vulnerable curling of his damp hair against his temples that made her heart ache. “You are a good actress, and you know your brother,” he said. “I have every confidence in you.”
She looked at him in surprise. “You do?”
“And,” he went on without answering her question, “in the event that something goes awry, I will be there. Even if you don’t see me, Tess, I’ll be there. Remember that.”
“All right.” She cocked her head to the side. “Will?”
“Yes?”
“There was a third reason you didn’t want to wake up Charlotte and tell her what we were doing, wasn’t there?”
He narrowed his blue eyes at her. “And what’s that?”
“Because you do not yet know if this is simply a foolish flirtation on Jessamine’s part, or something deeper and darker. A true connection to my brother and to Mortmain. And you know that if it is the second, it will break Charlotte’s heart.”
A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth. “And what do I care if it does? If she is foolish enough to attach herself to Jessamine—”
“You care,” said Tessa. “You are no inhuman block of ice, Will. I have seen you with Jem—I saw you when you looked at Cecily. And you had another sister, didn’t you?”
He looked at her sharply. “What makes you think I had—I have—more than one sister?”
“Jem said he thought your sister was dead,” she said. “And you said, ‘My sister is dead.’ But Cecily is clearly very much alive. Which made me think you had a sister who had died. One that wasn’t Cecily.”
Will let out a long, slow breath. “You’re clever.”
“But am I clever and right, or clever and wrong?”
Will looked as if he were glad for the mask that hid his expression. “Ella,” he said. “Two years older than I. And Cecily, three years younger. My sisters.”
“And Ella . . .”
Will looked away, but not before she saw the pain in his eyes. So Ella was dead.
“What was she like?” Tessa asked, remembering how grateful she had been when Jem had asked that of her, about Nate. “Ella? And Cecily, what kind of girl is she?”
“Ella was protective,” said Will. “Like a mother. She would have done anything for me. And Cecily was a little mad creature. She was only nine when I left. I can’t say if she’s still the same, but she was—like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. She was afraid of nothing and demanded everything. She could fight like a devil and swear like a Billingsgate fishwife.” There was amusement in his voice, and admiration, and . . . love. She had never heard him talk about anyone that way, except perhaps Jem.
“If I might ask—,” she began.
Will sighed. “You know you’ll ask whether I say it’s all right or not.”
“You have a younger sister of your own,” she said. “So what exactly did you do to Gabriel’s sister to make him hate you so?”
He straightened. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am forced to spend a great deal of time with the Lightwoods, and Gabriel clearly despises you. And you did break his arm. It would ease my mind if I knew why.”
Shaking his head, Will raked his fingers through his hair. “Dear God,” he said. “Their sister—her name is Tatiana, by the way; she was named after her mother’s dear friend, who was Russian—was twelve years old, I think.”
“Twelve?” Tessa was horrified.
Will exhaled. “I see you have already decided for yourself what happened,” he said. “Would it ease your mind further to know that I myself was twelve? Tatiana, she . . . fancied herself in love with me. In that way that little girls do. She would follow me around and giggle and duck behind pillars to stare at me.”
“One does silly things when one is twelve.”
“It was the first Christmas party at the Institute that I attended,” he said. “The Lightwoods were there in all their finery. Tatiana in silver hair ribbons. She had a little book she carried around with her everywhere. She must have dropped it that night. I found it shoved down the back of one of the chaise longues. It was her diary. Filled with poems about me—the color of my eyes, the wedding we would have. She had written ‘Tatiana Herondale’ all over it.”
“That sounds rather adorable.”
“I had been in the drawing room, but I came back into the ballroom with the diary. Elise Penhallow had just finished playing the spinet. I got up beside her and commenced reading from Tatiana’s diary.”
“Oh, Will—you didn’t!”
“I did,” he said. “She had rhymed ‘William’ with ‘million,’ as in ‘You will never know, sweet William / How many are the million / ways in which I love you.’ It had to be stopped.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, Tatiana ran out of the room in tears, and Gabriel leaped onto the stage and attempted to strangle me. Gideon simply stood there with his arms crossed. You’ll notice that’s all he ever does.”
“I suppose Gabriel didn’t succeed,” said Tessa. “In strangling you, I mean.”
“Not before I broke his arm,” said Will with relish. “So there you are. That’s why he hates me. I humiliated his sister in public, and what he won’t mention is that I humiliated him, too. He thought he could best me easily. I’d had little formal training, and I’d heard him call me ‘very nearly a mundane’ behind my back. Instead I beat him hollow—snapped his arm, in fact. It was certainly a more pleasant sound than Elise banging away on the spinet.”
Tessa rubbed her gloved hands together to warm them, and sighed. She wasn’t sure what to think. It was hardly the story of seduction and betrayal she had expected, but neither did it show Will in an admirable light.