He bent his head; his hair fell forward, hiding his face. She clenched her own hands into fists at her sides to stop herself from reaching out and pushing it back. “No,” he said, very low. “No, the Angel forgive me, I can’t say that.”
Tessa withdrew, curling in on herself, turning her face away. “Please go away, Will.”
“Tessa—”
“Please.”
There was a long silence. He stood up then, the bed creaking beneath him as he moved. She heard his light tread on the floorboards, and then the door of the bedroom shutting behind him. As if the sound had snapped some cord that held her upright, she fell back against the pillows. She stared up at the ceiling a long time, fighting back in vain against the questions that crowded her mind—What had Will meant, coming to her room like that? Why had he shown her such sweetness when she knew that he despised her? And why, when she knew that he was the worst thing in the world for her, did sending him away seem like such a terrible mistake?
The next morning dawned unexpectedly blue and beautiful, a balm to Tessa’s aching head and exhausted body. After dragging herself from the bed, where she had spent most of the night tossing and turning, she dressed herself, unable to bear the thought of assistance from one of the ancient, half-blind maidservants. As she did up the buttons on her jacket, she caught sight of herself in the room’s old, splotched mirror. There were half-moons of shadow under her eyes, as if they had been smudged there with chalk.
Will and Jem had already gathered in the morning room for a breakfast of half-burned toast, weak tea, jam, and no butter. By the time Tessa arrived, Jem had already eaten, and Will was busy cutting his toast into thin strips and forming rude pictographs out of them.
“What is that supposed to be?” Jem asked curiously. “It looks almost like a—” He glanced up, saw Tessa, and broke off with a grin. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” She slid into the seat across from Will; he glanced up at her once as she sat, but there was nothing in his eyes or expression to indicate that he recalled that anything had passed between them the night before.
Jem looked at her with concern. “Tessa, how are you feeling? After last night—” He broke off then, his voice rising, “Good morning, Mr. Starkweather,” he said hastily, jostling Will’s shoulder hard so that Will dropped his fork, and the toast bits slid all over his plate.
Mr. Starkweather, who had swept into the room, still wrapped in the dark cloak he had worn the night before, regarded him balefully. “The carriage is waiting for you in the courtyard,” he said, his clipped diction as tight as ever. “You’d better cut a stick if you want to get back before dinnertime; I’ll be needing the carriage this evening. I’ve told Gottshall to drop you straight at the station on your return, no need for lingering. I trust you’ve gotten everything you need.”
It wasn’t a question. Jem nodded. “Yes, sir. You’ve been very gracious.”
Starkweather’s eyes swept over Tessa again, one last time, before he turned and stalked out of the room, his cloak flapping behind him. Tessa couldn’t get the image of a great black bird of prey—a vulture, perhaps—out of her mind. She thought of the trophy cases full of “spoils,” and shuddered.
“Eat quickly, Tessa, before he changes his mind about the carriage,” Will advised her, but Tessa shook her head.
“I’m not hungry.”
“At least have tea.” Will poured it out for her, and ladled milk and sugar into it; it was much sweeter than Tessa would have liked, but it was so rare that Will made a kind gesture like that—even if it was just to hurry her along—that she drank it down anyway, and managed a few bites of toast. The boys went for their coats and the baggage; Tessa’s traveling cloak, hat, and gloves were located, and they soon found themselves on the front steps of the York Institute, blinking in the watery sunlight.
Starkweather had been as good as his word. His carriage was there, waiting for them, the four Cs of the Clave painted across the door. The old coachman with the long white beard and hair was already in the driver’s seat, smoking a cheroot; he tossed it aside when he saw the three of them, and sank down farther in his seat, his black eyes glaring out from beneath his drooping eyelids.
“Bloody hell, it’s the Ancient Mariner again,” said Will, though he seemed more entertained than anything else. He swung himself up into the carriage and helped Tessa in after him; Jem was last, shutting the door behind him and leaning out the window to call to the coachman to drive on. Tessa, settling herself in beside Will on the narrow seat, felt her shoulder brush his; he tensed immediately, and she moved away, biting her lip. It was as if last night had never happened and he were back to behaving as if she were poison.
The carriage began moving with a jerk that nearly flung Tessa into Will again, but she braced herself against the window and stayed where she was. The three of them were silent as the carriage rolled down narrow, cobbled Stonegate Street, under a wide sign advertising the Old Star Inn. Both Jem and Will were quiet, Will reviving only to tell her with a ghoulish glee that they were passing through the old walls, under the city entrance where once traitors’ heads had been displayed on spikes. Tessa made a face at him but gave no reply.
Once they had passed the walls, the city quickly gave way to countryside. The landscape was not gentle and rolling, but harsh and forbidding. Green hills dotted with gray gorse swept up into crags of dark rock. Long lines of mortarless stone walls, meant for keeping in sheep, crisscrossed the green; here and there was dotted the occasional lonely cottage. The sky seemed an endless expanse of blue, brushed with the strokes of long gray clouds.
Tessa could not have said how long they had been traveling when the stone chimneys of a large manor house rose in the distance. Jem stuck his head out the window again and called to the driver; the carriage came to a rolling stop.
“But we’re not there yet,” said Tessa, puzzled. “If that’s Ravenscar Manor—”
“We can’t just roll right up to the front door; be sensible, Tess,” said Will as Jem leaped out of the carriage and reached up to help Tessa down. Her boots plashed into the wet, muddy ground as she landed; Will dropped down lightly beside her. “We need to get a look at the place. Use Henry’s device to register demonic presence. Make sure we’re not walking into a trap.”
“Does Henry’s device actually work?” Tessa lifted her skirts to keep them out of the mud as the three of them started down the road. Glancing back, she saw the coachman apparently already asleep, leaning back in the driver’s seat with his hat tipped forward over his face. All around them the countryside was a patchwork of gray and green—hills rising starkly; their sides pitted with gray shale; flat sheep-cropped grass; and here and there copses of gnarled, entwined trees. There was a severe beauty to it all, but Tessa shuddered at the idea of living here, so far away from anything.
Jem, seeing her shudder, gave a sideways smile. “City lass.”
Tessa laughed. “I was thinking how odd it would be to grow up in a place like this, so far from any people.”
“Where I grew up was not so different from this,” said Will unexpectedly, startling them both. “It’s not so lonely as you might think. Out in the countryside, you can be assured, people visit one another a great deal. They just have a greater distance to traverse than they might in London. And once they arrive, they often make a lengthy stay. After all, why make the trip just to stay a night or two? We’d often have house guests who’d remain for weeks.”