He looked at Jem. His eyes were bluer than blue, his cheeks flushed, his features angelic. He said, “You did not have to come and fetch me like some child. I was having quite a pleasant time.”
Jem looked back at him. “God damn you,” he said, and hit Will across the face, sending him spinning. Will didn’t lose his footing, but fetched up against the side of the carriage, his hand to his cheek. His mouth was bleeding. He looked at Jem with total astonishment.
“Get him into the carriage,” Jem said to Cyril, and turned and went back through the red door—to pay for whatever Will had taken, Tessa thought. Will was still staring after him, the blood reddening his mouth.
“James?” he said.
“Come along, then,” said Cyril, not unkindly. He really was awfully like Thomas, Tessa thought as he opened the carriage door and helped Will inside, and then Tessa after him. He gave her a handkerchief from his pocket. It was warm and smelled like cheap eau de cologne. She smiled and thanked him as he shut the door.
Will was slumped in the corner of the carriage, his arms around himself, his eyes half-open. Blood had trickled down his chin. She leaned over and pressed the handkerchief to his mouth; he reached up and put his hand over hers, holding it there. “I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. “Haven’t I?”
“Dreadfully, I’m afraid,” said Tessa, trying not to notice the warmth of his hand over hers. Even in the darkness of the carriage, his eyes were luminously blue. What was it Jem had said, though, about beauty? Beauty is harsh. Would people forgive Will the things he did if he were ugly? And did it help him, in the end, to be forgiven? Though, she could not help but feel he did the things he did not because he loved himself too much but because he hated himself. And she did not know why.
He closed his eyes. “I’m so tired, Tess,” he said. “I only wanted pleasant dreams for once.”
“That is not the way to get them, Will,” she said softly. “You cannot buy or drug or dream your way out of pain.”
His hand tightened over hers.
The carriage door opened. Tessa drew back from Will hastily. It was Jem, his face like thunder; he spared a cursory glance at Will, threw himself into a seat, and reached up to rap on the roof. “Cyril, drive home,” he called, and after a moment the carriage lurched forward into the night. Jem reached out and drew the curtains across the windows. In the dimness Tessa slipped the handkerchief into her sleeve. It was still damp with Will’s blood.
Jem said nothing all the way back from Whitechapel, merely stared stonily ahead of him with his arms folded while Will slept, a faint smile on his face, in the corner of the carriage. Tessa, across from them both, could think of nothing to say to break Jem’s silence. This was so utterly unlike him—Jem, who was always sweet, always kind, always optimistic. His expression now was worse than blank, his nails digging into the fabric of his gear, his shoulders stiff and angular with rage.
The moment they drew up in front of the Institute, he threw the door open and leaped out. She heard him shout something to Cyril about helping Will to his room, and then he stalked away, up the steps, without another word to her. Tessa was so shocked, she could only stare after him for a moment. She moved to the carriage door; Cyril was already there, his hand up to help her down. Barely had Tessa’s shoes hit the cobblestones than she was hurrying after Jem, calling his name, but he was already inside the Institute. He had left the door open for her, and she dashed in after him, after only a brief glance to confirm that Will was being helped by Cyril. She hurried up the stairs, dropping her voice as she realized that, of course, the Institute was asleep, the witchlight torches dimmed to their lowest glow.
She went to Jem’s room first and knocked; when there was no answer, she sought a few of his most commonly visited haunts—the music room, the library—but, finding nothing, she returned, disconsolate, to her own room to ready herself for bed. In her nightgown, her dress brushed and hung up, she crawled between the sheets of her bed and stared at the ceiling. She even picked up Will’s copy of Vathek from her floor, but for the first time the poem in the front failed to make her smile, and she could not concentrate on the story.
She was startled at her own distress. Jem was angry at Will, not at her. Still, she thought, it was perhaps the first time he had lost his temper in front of her. The first time he had been curt with her, or not attended with kindness to her words, had not seemed to think of her first before himself. . . .
She had taken him for granted, she thought with surprise and shame, watching the flickering candlelight. She had assumed his kindness was so natural and so innate, she had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand between Will and the world, protecting each of them from the other. Any effort to accept the loss of his family with equanimity. Any effort to remain cheerful and calm in the face of his own dying.
A rending noise, the sound of something being wrenched apart, tore through the room. Tessa sat bolt upright. What was that? It seemed to be coming from outside her door—across the hall—
Jem?
She leaped to her feet and caught her dressing gown down from its peg. Hurriedly slipping into it, she darted out the door and into the corridor.
She had been correct—the noise was coming from Jem’s room. She remembered the first night she had met him, the lovely violin music that had poured like water through the doorway. This noise sounded nothing like Jem’s music. She could hear the saw of bow against string, yet it sounded like screaming, like a person screaming in awful pain. She both longed to go in and felt terrified to do so; finally she took hold of the knob of the door and swung it open, and then ducked inside and pulled the door closed fast after her.
“Jem,” she whispered.
The witchlight torches were burning low on the walls. Jem sat on the trunk at the foot of his bed in just his shirtsleeves and trousers, his silver hair tousled, the violin propped against his shoulder. He was sawing at it viciously with the bow, wringing awful sounds out of it, making it scream. As Tessa watched, one of the violin strings snapped with a shriek.
“Jem!” she cried again, and when he did not look up, she strode across the room and wrenched the bow out of his hand. “Jem, stop! Your violin—your lovely violin—you’ll ruin it.”
He looked up at her. His pupils were enormous, the silver of his eyes only a thin ring around the black. He was breathing hard, his shirt open at the neck, sweat standing out on his collarbones. His cheeks were flushed. “What does it matter?” he said in a voice so low it was almost a hiss. “What does any of it matter? I’m dying. I won’t outlast the decade. What does it matter if the violin goes before I do?”
Tessa was appalled. He never spoke like this about his illness, never.
He stood up and turned away from her, toward the window. Only a little moonlight found its way into the room through the fog; there seemed to be shapes visible in the white mist pressed against the window—ghosts, shades, mocking faces. “You know it is true.”
“Nothing is decided.” Her voice shook. “Nothing is inevitable. A cure—”
“There’s no cure.” He no longer sounded angry, just detached, which was almost worse. “I will die, and you know it, Tess. Probably within the next year. I am dying, and I have no family in the world, and the one person I trusted more than any other made sport of what is killing me.”