Gabriel replied, his voice tense, “We will stand with Father, of course. Where else?”
There was a pause. Then, “You don’t know everything about him, Gabriel. You don’t know all that he has done.”
“I know that we are Lightwoods and that he is our father. I know he fully expected to be named head of the Institute when Granville Fairchild died—”
“Maybe the Consul knows more about him than you do. And more about Charlotte Branwell. She isn’t the fool you think she is.”
“Really?” Gabriel’s voice was a sneer. “Letting us come here to train her precious girls, doesn’t that make her a fool? Shouldn’t she have assumed we’d be spying for our father?”
Sophie and Tessa looked at each other with round eyes.
“She agreed to it because the Consul forced her hand. And besides, we are met at the door here, escorted to this room, and escorted out. And Miss Collins and Miss Gray know nothing of import. What damage is our presence here really doing her, would you say?”
There was a silence through which Tessa could almost hear Gabriel sulking. At last he said, “If you despise Father so much, why did you ever come back from Spain?”
Gideon replied, sounding exasperated, “I came back for you—”
Sophie and Tessa had been leaning against the door, ears pressed to the wood. At that moment the door gave way and swung open. Both straightened hastily, Tessa hoping that no evidence of their eavesdropping appeared on their faces.
Gabriel and Gideon were standing in a patch of light at the center of the room, facing off against each other. Tessa noticed something she had not noticed before: Gabriel, despite being the younger brother, was lankily taller than Gideon by some inches. Gideon was more muscular, broader through the shoulders. He swept a hand through his sandy hair, nodding curtly to the girls as they appeared in the doorway. “Good day.”
Gabriel Lightwood strode across the room to meet them. He really was quite tall, Tessa thought, craning her neck to look up at him. As a tall girl herself, she didn’t often find herself bending her head back to look up at men, though both Will and Jem were taller than she was.
“Miss Lovelace still regrettably absent?” he inquired without bothering to greet them. His face was calm, the only sign of his earlier agitation a pulse hammering just beneath a Courage in Combat rune inked upon his throat.
“She continues to have the headache,” said Tessa, following him into the training room. “We don’t know how long she’ll be indisposed.”
“Until these training sessions are over, I suspect,” said Gideon, so dryly that Tessa was surprised when Sophie laughed. Sophie immediately composed her features again, but not before Gideon had given her a surprised, almost appreciative glance, as if he weren’t used to having his jokes laughed at.
With a sigh Gabriel reached up and freed two long sticks from their holsters on the wall. He handed one to Tessa. “Today,” he began, “we shall be working on parrying and blocking . . .”
As usual, Tessa lay awake a long time that night before sleep began to come. Nightmares had plagued her recently—usually of Mortmain, his cold gray eyes, and his colder voice saying measuredly that he had made her, that There is no Tessa Gray.
She had come face-to-face with him, the man they sought, and still she did not really know what he wanted from her. To marry her, but why? To claim her power, but to what end? The thought of his cold lizardlike eyes on her made her shiver; the thought that he might have had something to do with her birth was even worse. She did not think anyone—not even Jem, wonderful understanding Jem—quite understood her burning need to know what she was, or the fear that she was some sort of monster, a fear that woke her in the middle of the night, leaving her gasping and clawing at her own skin, as if she could peel it away to reveal a devil’s hide beneath.
Just then she heard a rustle at her door, and the faint scratch of something being gently pushed against it. After a moment’s pause she slid off the bed and padded across the room.
She eased the door open to find an empty corridor, the faint sound of violin music drifting from Jem’s room across the hall. At her feet was a small green book. She picked it up and gazed at the words stamped in gold on its spine: “Vathek, by William Beckford.”
She shut the door behind her and carried the book over to her bed, sitting down so she could examine it. Will must have left it for her. Obviously it could have been no one else. But why? Why these odd, small kindnesses in the dark, the talk about books, and the coldness the rest of the time?
She opened the book to its title page. Will had scrawled a note for her there—not just a note, in fact. A poem.
For Tessa Gray, on the occasion of being given
a copy of Vathek to read:
Caliph Vathek and his dark horde
Are bound for Hell, you won’t be bored!
Your faith in me will be restored—
Unless this token you find untoward
And my poor gift you have ignored.
—Will
Tessa burst out laughing, then clapped a hand over her mouth. Drat Will, for always being able to make her laugh, even when she didn’t want to, even when she knew that opening her heart to him even an inch was like taking a pinch of some deadly addictive drug. She dropped the copy of Vathek, complete with Will’s deliberately terrible poem, onto her nightstand and rolled onto the bed, burying her face in the pillows. She could still hear Jem’s violin music, sweetly sad, drifting beneath her door. As hard as she could, she tried to push thoughts of Will out of her mind; and indeed, when she fell asleep at last and dreamed, for once he made no appearance.
It rained the next day, and despite her umbrella Tessa could feel the fine hat she had borrowed from Jessamine beginning to sag like a waterlogged bird around her ears as they—she, Jem, Will, and Cyril, carrying their luggage—hurried from the coach into Kings Cross Station. Through the sheets of gray rain she was conscious only of a tall, imposing building, a great clock tower rising from the front. It was topped with a weathercock that showed that the wind was blowing due north—and not gently, spattering drops of cold rain into her face.
Inside, the station was chaos: people hurrying hither and thither, newspaper boys hawking their wares, men striding up and down with sandwich boards strapped to their chests, advertising everything from hair tonic to soap. A little boy in a Norfolk jacket dashed to and fro, his mother in hot pursuit. With a word to Jem, Will vanished immediately into the crowd.
“Gone off and left us, has he?” said Tessa, struggling with her umbrella, which was refusing to close.
“Let me do that.” Deftly Jem reached over and flicked at the mechanism; the umbrella shut with a decided snap. Pushing her damp hair out of her eyes, Tessa smiled at him, just as Will returned with an aggrieved-looking porter who relieved Cyril of the baggage and snapped at them to hurry up, the train wouldn’t wait all day.
Will looked from the porter to Jem’s cane, and back. His blue eyes narrowed. “It will wait for us,” Will said with a deadly smile.
The porter looked bewildered but said “Sir” in a decidedly less aggressive tone and proceeded to lead them toward the departure platform. People—so many people!—streamed about Tessa as she made her way through the crowd, clutching at Jem with one hand and Jessamine’s hat with the other. Far at the end of the station, where the tracks ran out into open ground, she could see the steel gray sky, smudged with soot.