But Will—Will. He had said she should be ready to swoon at his finery, and she had rolled her eyes, but in his black and white evening dress, he looked more beautiful than she had imagined. The stark and simple colors brought out the angular perfection of his features. His dark hair tumbled over a black half mask that emphasized the blueness of the eyes behind it. She felt her heart contract, and hated herself instantly for it. She looked away from him, at Cyril, in the driver’s seat of the carriage. His eyes narrowed in confusion as he saw her; he looked from her to Will, and back again, and shrugged. Tessa wondered what on earth Will had told him they were doing to explain the fact that he was taking Jessamine to Chiswick in the middle of the night. It must have been quite a story.
“Ah,” was all Will said as she descended the steps and drew her wrap around herself. She hoped he would put down to the cold the involuntary shiver that went over her as he took her hand. “I see now why your brother quoted that execrable poetry. You are meant to be Maud, aren’t you? ‘Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls’?”
“You know,” Tessa said as he helped her up into the carriage, “I don’t care for that poem either.”
He swung himself up after her and slammed the carriage door shut. “Jessamine adores it.”
The carriage began to rumble across the cobblestones, and through the open doors of the gate. Tessa found that her heart was beating very fast. Fear of being caught by Charlotte and Henry, she told herself. Nothing to do with being alone with Will in the carriage. “I am not Jessamine.”
He looked at her levelly. There was something in his eyes, a sort of quizzical admiration; she wondered if it was simply admiration of Jessamine’s looks. “No,” he said. “No, even though you are the perfect picture of Jessamine, I can see Tessa through it somehow—as if, if I were to scrape away a layer of paint, there would be my Tessa underneath.”
“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.”