“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Tessa, “what was it that your uncle had done?”
“Silas? Fell in love with his parabatai. Not, actually, as Gabriel says, a minor infraction but a major one. Romantic relationships between parabatai are absolutely forbidden. Though even the best-trained Shadowhunter can fall prey to emotion. The Clave would have separated the two of them, though, and that Silas couldn’t face. That’s why he killed himself. My mother was consumed with rage and grief. I can well believe that her dying wish was that we would take the Institute from the Fairchilds. Gabriel was younger than I when our mother died—only five years old, clinging to her skirts still—and it seems to me his feelings are too overwhelming for him now to quite understand them. Whereas I—I feel that the sins of the fathers should not be visited on the sons.”
“Or the daughters,” said Will.
Gideon looked at him and gave him a crooked smile. There was no dislike in it; in fact, it was jarringly the look of someone who understood Will, and why he behaved as he did. Even Will looked a bit surprised. “There is the problem that Gabriel will never come back here, of course,” said Gideon. “Not after this.”
Sophie, whose color had started to return, paled again. “Mrs. Branwell will be furious—”
Tessa waved her back. “I’ll go after him and apologize, Sophie. It will be all right.”
She heard Gideon call after her, but she was already hurrying from the room. She hated to admit it, but she’d felt a spark of sympathy for Gabriel when Gideon had been telling his story. Losing a mother when you were so young you could barely remember her later was something she had familiarity with. If someone had told her that her mother had had a dying wish, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have done everything in her power to execute it . . . whether it made sense or not.
“Tessa!” She was partway down the corridor when she heard Will calling after her. She spun and saw him striding down the hall in her direction, a half smile on his face.
Her next words wiped his smile away. “Why are you following me? Will, you shouldn’t have left them alone! You must go back to the training room, right away.”
Will planted his feet. “Why?”
Tessa threw up her hands. “Don’t men notice anything? Gideon has designs on Sophie—”
“On Sophie?”
“She’s a very beautiful girl,” flared Tessa. “You’re an idiot if you haven’t noticed the way he looks at her, but I don’t want him taking advantage of her. She’s had enough such trouble in her life—and besides, if you’re with me, Gabriel won’t talk to me. You know he won’t.”
Will muttered something under his breath and seized her wrist. “Here. Come with me.”
The warmth of his skin against hers sent a jolt up her arm. He pulled her into the drawing room and across to the great windows that looked down over the courtyard. He released her wrist just in time for her to lean forward and see the Lightwoods’ carriage rattling furiously across the stone yard and under the iron gates.
“There,” Will said. “Gabriel’s gone anyway, unless you want to chase after the carriage. And Sophie’s perfectly sensible. She’s not going to let Gideon Lightwood have his way with her. Besides, he’s about as charming as a postbox.”
Tessa, surprising even herself, let out a gasp of laughter. She put her hand up to cover her mouth, but it was too late; she was already laughing, leaning a little against the window.
Will looked at her, his blue eyes quizzical, his mouth just beginning to quirk up in a grin. “I must be more amusing than I thought. Which would make me very amusing indeed.”
“I’m not laughing at you,” she told him in between giggles. “Just—Oh! The look on Gabriel’s face when Sophie slapped him. My goodness.” She pushed her hair out of her face and said, “I really shouldn’t be laughing. Half the reason he was so awful was your goading him. I should be angry with you.”
“Oh, should,” said Will, spinning away to drop into a chair near the fire, and stretching out his long legs toward the flames. Like every room in England, Tessa thought, it was chilly in here except just in front of the fire. One roasted in the front and froze in the back, like a badly cooked turkey. “No good sentences ever include the word ‘should.’ I should have paid the tavern bill; now they’re coming to break my legs. I should never have run off with my best friend’s wife; now she devils me constantly. I should—”
“You should,” Tessa said softly, “think about the way the things you do affect Jem.”
Will rolled his head back against the leather of the chair and regarded her. He looked drowsy and tired and beautiful. He could have been some Pre-Raphaelite Apollo. “Is this a serious conversation now, Tess?” His voice still held humor but was edged, like a gold blade edged in razored steel.
Tessa came and sat down in the armchair across from his. “Aren’t you worried that he’s cross with you? He’s your parabatai. And he’s Jem. He’s never cross.”
“Perhaps it’s better that he’s cross with me,” said Will. “So much saintlike patience cannot be good for anyone.”
“Do not mock him.” Tessa’s tone was sharp.
“Nothing is beyond mockery, Tess.”
“Jem is. He has always been good to you. He is nothing but goodness. That he hit you last night, that only shows how capable you are of driving even saints to madness.”
“Jem hit me?” Will, fingering his cheek, looked amazed. “I must confess, I remember very little of last night. Only that the two of you woke me, though I very much wanted to stay asleep. I remember Jem shouting at me, and you holding me. I knew it was you. You always smell of lavender.”
Tessa ignored this. “Well, Jem hit you. And you deserved it.”
“You do look scornful—rather like Raziel in all those paintings, as if he were looking down on us. So tell me, scornful angel, what did I do to deserve being hit in the face by James?”
Tessa reached for the words, but they eluded her; she turned to the language she and Will shared—poetry. “You know, in that essay of Donne’s, what he says—”
“‘License my roving hands, and let them go’?” quoted Will, eyeing her.
“I meant the essay about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others. Yet you never think about it. You behave as if you live on some sort of—of Will island, and none of your actions can have any consequences. Yet they do.”
“How does my going to a warlock den affect Jem?” Will inquired. “I suppose he had to come and haul me out, but he’s done more dangerous things in the past for me. We protect each other—”
“No, you don’t,” Tessa cried in frustration. “Do you think he cares about the danger? Do you? His whole life has been destroyed by this drug, this yin fen, and there you go off to a warlock den and drug yourself up as if it doesn’t even matter, as if it’s just a game to you. He has to take this foul stuff every day just so he can live, but in the meantime it’s killing him. He hates to be dependent on it. He can’t even bring himself to buy it; he has you do that.” Will made a sound of protest, but Tessa held up a hand. “And then you swan down to Whitechapel and throw your money at the people who make these drugs and addict other people to them, as if it were some sort of holiday on the Continent for you. What were you thinking?”
“But it had nothing to do with Jem at all—”
“You didn’t think about him,” said Tessa. “But perhaps you should have. Don’t you understand he thinks you made a mockery out of what’s killing him? And you’re supposed to be his brother.”
Will had whitened. “He can’t think that.”
“He does,” she said. “He understands you don’t care what other people think about you. But I believe he always expected you’d care what he thought. What he felt.”
Will leaned forward. The firelight made odd patterns against his skin, darkening the bruise on his cheek to black. “I do care what other people think,” he said with a surprising intensity, staring into the flames. “It’s all I
think about—what others think, what they feel about me, and I about them; it drives me mad. I wanted escape—”
“You can’t mean that. Will Herondale, minding what others think of him?” Tessa tried to make her voice as light as possible. The look on his face startled her. It was not closed but open, as if he were caught half-entangled in a thought he desperately wanted to share, but could not bear to. This is the boy who took my private letters and hid them in his room, she thought, but she could work up no anger about it. She had thought she would be furious when she saw him again, but she was not, only puzzled and wondering. Surely it showed a curiosity about other people that was quite un-Will-like, to want to read them in the first place?
There was something raw in his face, his voice. “Tess,” he said. “That is all I think about. I never look at you without thinking about what you feel about me and fearing—”
He broke off as the drawing room door opened and Charlotte came in, followed by a tall man whose bright blond hair shone like a sunflower in the dim light. Will turned away quickly, his face working. Tessa stared at him. What had he been going to say?
“Oh!” Charlotte was clearly startled to see them both. “Tessa, Will—I didn’t realize you were in here.”
Will’s hands were in fists at his sides, his face in shadow, but his voice was level when he replied: “We saw the fire going. It’s as chill as ice in the rest of the house.”
Tessa stood up. “We’ll just be on our way—”
“Will Herondale, excellent to see you looking well. And Tessa Gray!” The blond man broke away from Charlotte and came toward Tessa, beaming as if he knew her. “The shape-changer, correct? Enchanted to meet you. What a curiosity.”
Charlotte sighed. “Mr. Woolsey Scott, this is Miss Tessa Gray. Tessa, this is Mr. Woolsey Scott, head of the London werewolf pack, and an old friend of the Clave.”
“Very well, then,” said Gideon as the door shut behind Tessa and Will. He turned toward Sophie, who was suddenly acutely aware of the largeness of the room, and how small she felt inside it. “Shall we continue with the training?”
He held out a knife to her, shining like a silver wand in the room’s dimness. His green eyes were steady. Everything about Gideon was steady—his gaze, his voice, the way he held himself. She remembered what it felt like to have those steady arms around her, and shivered involuntarily. She had never been alone with him before, and it frightened her. “I don’t think my heart would be in it, Mr. Lightwood,” she said. “I appreciate the offer all the same, but . . .”
He lowered his arm slowly. “You think that I don’t take training you seriously?”
“I think you’re being very generous. But I ought to face facts, oughtn’t I? This training was never about me or Tessa. It was about your father and the Institute. And now that I’ve slapped your brother—” She felt her throat tighten. “Mrs. Branwell would be so disappointed in me if she knew.”
“Nonsense. He deserved it. And the little matter of the blood feud between our families does come to mind.” Gideon spun the silver knife carelessly about his finger and thrust it through his belt. “Charlotte would probably give you a rise in salary if she knew.”
Sophie shook her head. They were only a few steps from a bench; she sank down onto it, feeling exhausted. “You don’t know Charlotte. She’d feel honor-bound to discipline me.”
Gideon settled himself on the bench—not beside her, but against the far side of it, as distant from her as he could get. Sophie couldn’t decide whether she was pleased about that or not. “Miss Collins,” he said. “There is something you ought to know.”
She laced her fingers together. “What is that?”
He leaned forward a little, his broad shoulders hunched. She could see the flecks of gray in his green eyes. “When my father called me back from Madrid,” he said, “I did not want to come. I had never been happy in London. Our house has been a miserable place since my mother died.”
Sophie just stared at him. She could think of no words. He was a Shadowhunter and a gentleman, and yet he seemed to be unburdening his soul to her. Even Jem, for all his gentle kindness, had never done that.
“When I heard about these lessons, I thought they would be a dreadful waste of my time. I pictured two very silly girls uninterested in any sort of instruction. But that describes neither Miss Gray nor yourself. I should tell you, I used to train younger Shadowhunters in Madrid. And there were quite a few of them who didn’t have the same native ability that you do. You’re a talented student, and it’s a pleasure to teach you.”
Sophie felt herself flush scarlet. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I came here, and again so the next time and the next. I found that I was looking forward to it. In fact, it would be fair to say that since my return home, I have hated everything in London except these hours here, with you.”
“But you said ‘ay Dios mio’ every time I dropped my dagger—”
He grinned. It lit up his face, changed it. Sophie stared at him. He was not beautiful like Jem was, but he was very handsome, especially when he smiled. The smile seemed to reach out and touch her heart, speeding its pace. He is a Shadowhunter, she thought. And a gentleman. This is not the way to think about him. Stop it. But she could not stop, any more than she had been able to put Jem out of her mind. Though, where with Jem she had felt safe, with Gideon she felt an excitement like lightning that coursed up and down her veins, shocking her. And yet she did not want to let it go.
“I speak Spanish when I’m in a good mood,” he said. “You might as well know that about me.”
“So it wasn’t that you were so weary of my ineptitude that you were wishing to hurl yourself off the roof?”
“Just the opposite.” He leaned closer to her. His eyes were the green-gray of a stormy sea. “Sophie? Might I ask you something?”
She knew she should correct him, ask him to call her Miss Collins, but she didn’t. “I—yes?”
“Whatever happens with the lessons—might I see you again?”
Will had risen to his feet, but Woolsey Scott was still examining Tessa, his hand under his chin, studying her as if she were something under glass in a natural history exhibit. He was not at all what she would have thought the leader of a pack of werewolves would look like. He was probably in his early twenties, tall but slender to the point of slightness, with blond hair nearly to his shoulders, dressed in a velvet jacket, knee breeches, and a trailing scarf with a paisley print. A tinted monocle obscured one pale green eye. He looked like drawings she’d seen in Punch of those who called themselves “aesthetes.”
“Adorable,” he pronounced finally. “Charlotte, I insist they stay while we talk. What a charming couple they make. See how his dark hair sets off her pale skin—”
“Thank you,” said Tessa, her voice shooting several octaves higher than usual, “Mr. Scott, that’s very gracious, but there is no attachment between Will and myself. I don’t know what you’ve heard—”
“Nothing!” he declared, throwing himself into a chair and arranging his scarf around him. “Nothing at all, I assure you, though your blushing belies your words. Come along now, everyone, sit down. There’s no need to be intimidated by me. Charlotte, ring for some tea. I’m parched.”
Tessa looked to Charlotte, who shrugged as if to say there was nothing to be done about it. Slowly Tessa sat back down. Will sat as well. She didn’t look at him; she couldn’t, with Woolsey Scott grinning at them both as if he knew something she didn’t know.
“And where’s young Mr. Carstairs?” he inquired. “Adorable boy. Such interesting coloring. And so talented on the violin. Of course, I’ve heard Garcin himself play at the Paris Opera, and after that, well, everything simply sounds like coal dust scraping the eardrums. Pity about his illness.”
Charlotte, who had gone across the room to ring for Bridget, returned and sat down, smoothing her skirts. “In a way, that’s what I wanted to speak to you ab
out—”
“Oh, no, no, no.” From nowhere Scott had produced a majolica box, which he waved in Charlotte’s direction. “No serious discussion, please, until I’ve had my tea and a smoke. Egyptian cigar?” He offered her the box. “They’re the finest available.”
“No, thank you.” Charlotte looked mildly horrified at the idea of smoking a cigar; indeed, it was hard to picture, and Tessa felt Will, beside her, laugh silently. Scott shrugged and went back to his smoking preparations. The majolica box was a clever little thing with compartments for the cigars, tied in a bundle with a silk ribbon, new matches and old, and a place to tap one’s ashes. They watched as the werewolf lit his cigar with evident relish, and the sweet scent of tobacco filled the room.
“Now,” he said. “Tell me how you’ve been, Charlotte, darling. And that abstracted husband of yours. Still wandering around the crypt inventing things that blow up?”
“Sometimes,” said Will, “they’re even supposed to blow up.”
There was a rattle, and Bridget arrived with a tea tray, sparing Charlotte the need to answer. She set the tea things down on the inlaid table between the chairs, glancing back and forth anxiously. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Branwell. I thought there was only going to be two for tea—”
“It’s quite all right, Bridget,” said Charlotte, her tone firmly dismissive. “I will ring for you if we need anything else.”
Bridget dropped a curtsy and left, casting a curious eye over her shoulder at Woolsey Scott as she went. He took no notice of her. He had already poured milk into his teacup and was looking reproachfully at his hostess. “Oh, Charlotte.”
She looked at him in bewilderment. “Yes?”
“The tongs—the sugar tongs,” Scott said sadly, in the voice of someone remarking on the tragic death of an acquaintance. “They’re silver.”
“Oh!” Charlotte looked startled. Silver, Tessa remembered, was dangerous for werewolves. “I’m so sorry—”
Scott sighed. “It’s quite all right. Fortunately, I travel with my own.” From another pocket in his velvet jacket—which was buttoned over a silk waistcoat with a print of water lilies that would have put one of Henry’s to shame—he produced a rolled-up bit of silk; unrolling it revealed a set of gold tongs and a teaspoon. He set them on the table, took the lid off the teapot, and looked pleased. “Gunpowder tea! From Ceylon, I presume? Have you ever had the tea in Marrakech? They drench it in sugar or honey—”
The Infernal Devices Series Page 61