“If there are any clues to his whereabouts,” said Jem, gently trying to steer the conversation back onto its track. “We have very little time—”
“Very well, very well,” snapped Starkweather. “There’s little information about your precious Mortmain in here. More about the parents. It seems suspicion fell on them when it was discovered that the male warlock, John Shade, was in possession of the Book of the White. Quite a powerful spell book, you understand; disappeared from the London Institute’s library under suspicious circumstances back in 1752. The book specializes in binding and unbinding spells—tying the soul to the body, or untying it, as the case may be. Turned out the warlock was trying to animate things. He was digging up corpses or buying them off medical students and replacing the more damaged bits with mechanisms. Then trying to bring them to life. Necromancy—very much against the Law. And we didn’t have the Accords in those days. An Enclave group swept in and slaughtered both warlocks.”
“And the child?” said Will. “Mortmain?”
“No hide nor hair of him,” said Starkweather. “We searched, but nothing. Assumed he was dead, till this turned up, cheeky as you please, demanding reparations. Even his address—”
“His address?” Will demanded. That information had not been included in the scroll they had seen at the Institute. “In London?”
“Nay. Right here in Yorkshire.” Starkweather tapped the page with a wrinkled finger. “Ravenscar Manor. A massive old pile up north from here. Been abandoned now, I think, for decades. Now that I think about it, can’t figure how he could’ve afforded it in the first place. It’s not where the Shades lived.”
“Still,” said Jem. “An excellent starting point for us to go looking. If it’s been abandoned since his tenancy, there may be things he left behind. In fact, he may well still be using the place.”
“I suppose.” Starkweather sounded unenthusiastic about the whole business. “Most of the Shades’ belongings were taken for spoils.”
“Spoils,” Tessa echoed faintly. She remembered the term from the Codex. Anything a Shadowhunter took from a Downworlder who had been caught breaking the Law belonged to him. Those were the spoils of war. She looked across the table at Jem and Will; Jem’s gentle eyes resting on her with concern, Will’s haunted blue ones holding all their secrets. Did she really belong to a race of creatures that was at war with what Jem and Will were?
“Spoils,” Starkweather rumbled. He had polished off his wine and started on Will’s untouched glass. “Do those interest you, girl? We’ve quite a collection here in the Institute. Puts the London collection to shame, or so I’m told.” He stood up, nearly knocking over his chair. “Come along. I’ll show them to you, and tell you the rest of this sorry tale, though there’s not that much more to it.”
Tessa looked quickly to Will and Jem for a cue, but they were already on their feet, following the old man out of the room. Starkweather spoke as he walked, his voice drifting back over his shoulder, making the rest of them hurry to match his long strides.
“Never thought much of this Reparations business myself,” he said as they passed down another dimly lit, interminably long stone corridor. “Makes Downworlders uppity, thinking they have a right to get something out of us. All the work we do and no thanks, just hands held out for more, more, more. Don’t you think so, gentlemen?”
“Bastards, all of them,” said Will, who seemed as if his mind were a thousand miles away. Jem looked at him sideways.
“Absolutely!” barked Starkweather, clearly pleased. “Not that one should use such language in front of a lady, of course. As I was saying, this Mortmain was protesting the death of Anne Shade, the male warlock’s wife—said she’d had nothing to do with her husband’s projects, hadn’t known about them, he claimed. Her death was undeserved. Wanted a trial of those guilty of what he called her ‘murder,’ and his parents’ belongings back.”
“Was the Book of the White among what he asked for?” Jem inquired. “I know it’s a crime for a warlock to own such a volume . . .”
“It was. It was retrieved and placed in the London Institute library, where no doubt it remains still. Certainly no one was going to give it to him.”
Tessa did a quick mental calculation in her head. If he was eighty-nine now, Starkweather would have been twenty-six at the time of the Shades’ deaths. “Were you there?”
His bloodshot eyes danced over her; she noticed that even now, a little drunk, he didn’t seem to want to look at her too directly. “Was I where?”
“You said an Enclave group was sent out to deal with the Shades. Were you among them?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Aye,” he said, his Yorkshire accent thickening for a moment. “Dinna take long to get the both of them. They weren’t prepared. Not a bit. I remember them lying there in their blood. The first time I saw dead warlocks, I was surprised they bled red. I could have sworn it’d be another color, blue or green or some such.” He shrugged. “We took the cloaks off them, like skins off a tiger. I was given the keeping of them, or more rightly, my father was. Glory, glory. Those were the days.” He grinned like a skull, and Tessa thought of Bluebeard’s chamber where he kept the remains of the wives he had killed. She felt both very hot and very cold all over.
“Mortmain never had a chance, did he,” she said quietly. “Filing his complaint like that. He was never going to get his reparations.”
“Of course not!” barked Starkweather. “Rubbish, all of it—claiming the wife wasn’t involved. What wife isn’t neck-deep in her husband’s business? Besides, he wasn’t even their blood son, couldn’t have been. Probably more of a pet to them than anything else. I’d wager the father’d have used him for spare parts if it came down to it. He was better off without them. He should have been thanking us, not asking for a trial—”
The old man broke off as he reached a heavy door at the end of the corridor and put his shoulder to it, grinning down at them from beneath beetling brows. “Ever been to the Crystal Palace? Well, this is even better.”
He shouldered the door open, and light blazed up around them as they passed through into the room beyond. Clearly it was the only well-lit room in the place.
The room was full of glass-fronted cabinets, and over each cabinet was mounted a lamp of witchlight, illuminating the contents within. Tessa saw Will’s back stiffen, and Jem reached for her, his hand tightening on her arm with an almost bruising grip. “Don’t—,” he began, but she had pushed forward, and was staring at the contents of the cabinets.
Spoils. A gold locket, open to a daguerreotype of a laughing child. The locket was splattered with dried blood. Behind her Starkweather was talking about digging the silver bullets out of the bodies of freshly killed werewolves and melting them down to recast. There was a dish of such bullets, in fact, in one of the cabinets, filling a bloodstained bowl. Sets of vampire fangs, row on row of them. What looked like sheets of gossamer or delicate fabric, pressed under glass. Only on closer inspection did Tessa realize they were the wings of faeries. A goblin, like the one she had seen with Jessamine in Hyde Park, floating open-eyed in a large jar of preservative fluid.