Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Princess

Keep them in check. She fumed. As if they were all children and she no better than their governess or nursemaid, parading them in front of the Consul when they were washed and dressed, and hiding them in the playroom the rest of the time that he not be disturbed. They were Shadowhunters , and so was she. And if he did not think that Will was reliable, he was a fool. He knew of the curse; she had told him herself. Will’s madness had always been like Hamlet’s, half play and half wildness, and all driving toward a certain end.

The fire crackled in the grate; outside, the rain sheeted down, painting the windowpanes in silver lines. That morning she had passed Jem’s bedroom, the door open, the bed divested of its linens, the possessions cleared away. It could have been anyone’s room. All the evidence of his years with them, gone with the wave of a hand. She had leaned against the wall of the corridor, sweat beading on her brow, her eyes burning. Raziel, did I do the right thing?

She passed her hand over her eyes now. “Now, of all times? It isn’t Consul Wayland, is it?”

“No, ma’am.” Sophie shook her dark head. “It’s Aloysius Starkweather. He says it is a matter of the greatest urgency.”

“Aloysius Starkweather?” Charlotte sighed. Some days simply piled horror on horror. “Well, let him in, then.”

She folded the letter she had written as a response to the Consul, and had just sealed it when Sophie returned and ushered Aloysius Starkweather into the room, before excusing herself. Charlotte did not rise from her desk. Starkweather looked much as he had the last time she had seen him. He seemed to have calcified, as if while he was getting no younger, he could get no older either. His face was a map of wrinkled lines, framed with a white beard and white hair. His clothes were dry; Sophie must have hung his overcoat downstairs. The suit he wore was at least ten years out of fashion, and he smelled faintly of old mothballs.

“Please be seated, Mr. Starkweather,” said Charlotte as courteously as she could to someone who she knew disliked her, and had hated her father.

But he did not sit down. His hands were locked behind his back, and as he turned, surveying the room around him, Charlotte saw with a flash of alarm that one of the cuffs of his jacket was splattered with blood.

“Mr. Starkweather,” she said, and now she did rise. “Are you hurt? Should I summon the Brothers?”

“Hurt?” he barked out. “Why would I be hurt?”

“Your sleeve.” She pointed.

He drew his arm away and gazed at it before huffing out a laugh. “Not my blood,” he said. “I was in a fight, earlier. He took objection . . .”

“Took objection to what?”

“To my cutting off all his fingers and then slitting his throat,” said Starkweather, meeting her eyes. His own were gray-black, the color of stone.

“Aloysius.” Charlotte forgot to be polite. “The Accords forbid unproved attacks on Downworlders.”

“Unprovoked? I’d say this was provoked. His folk murdered my granddaughter. My daughter nearly died of grief. The house of Starkweather destroyed—”

“Aloysius!” Charlotte was seriously alarmed now. “Your house is not destroyed. There are still Starkweathers in Idris. I do not say that to minimize your sorrow, for some losses are with us always.” Jem, she thought, unbidden, and the pain of the thought pushed her back into the chair. She rested her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. “I do not know why you came to tell me this now,” she murmured. “Did you not see the runes upon the door of the Institute? This is a time of great sorrow for us—”

“I came to tell you because it’s important!” Aloysius flared up. “It regards Mortmain, and Tessa Gray.”

Charlotte lowered her hands. “What do you know of Tessa Gray?”

Aloysius had turned away. He stood facing the fire, his long shadow cast across the Persian rug on the floor. “I am not a man who thinks much of the Accords,” he said. “You know it; you have been in Councils with me. I was brought up to believe that everything touched by demons was foul and corrupt. That it was the blood right of a Shadowhunter to kill these creatures and to take what they had as spoils and treasure. The spoils room of the Institute in York was left in my charge, and I kept it filled until the day the new Laws were passed.” He scowled.

“Let me guess,” said Charlotte. “You did not stop there.”

“Of course not,” said the old man. “What are man’s Laws to the Angel’s? I know the right way of doing things. I kept a lower profile, but I did not cease taking spoils, or destroying those Downworlders who crossed my path. One of those was John Shade.”

“Mortmain’s father.”

“Warlocks cannot have children,” snarled Starkweather. “Some human boy they found and trained up. Shade taught him his unholy tinkering ways. Won his trust.”

“It’s unlikely the Shades stole Mortmain from his parents,” said Charlotte. “He was probably a boy who would have died in a workhouse otherwise.”

“It was unnatural. Warlocks should not have human children to raise.” Aloysius stared deep within the red embers of the fire. “That is why we raided Shade’s house. We killed him and his wife. The boy escaped. Shade’s clockwork prince .” He snorted. “We took several of his items back with us to the Institute, but none of us could make head or tail of them. That was all there was to it—a routine raid. Everything according to plan. That is, until my granddaughter was born. Adele.”

“I know that she died at her first rune ceremony,” said Charlotte, her hand unconsciously going to her own belly. “I am sorry. It is a great sorrow to have a sickly child—”

“She was not born sickly!” he barked. “She was a healthy infant. Beautiful, with my son’s eyes. Everyone doted on her, until one morning my daughter-in-law woke us with a scream. She insisted that the child in her cradle was not her daughter, though they looked exactly alike. She swore she knew her own child and this was not it. We thought she had gone mad. Even when the baby’s eyes changed from blue to gray—well, that happens often with infants. It wasn’t until we tried to apply her first Marks that I began to realize my daughter-in-law had been right. Adele—the pain was excruciating for her. She screamed and screamed and writhed. Her skin burned where the stele touched her. The Silent Brothers did all they could, but by the next morning she was dead.”

Aloysius paused and was silent for a long time, gazing, as if fascinated, into the fire.

“My daughter-in-law nearly went mad. She could not bear to remain in the Institute. I stayed. I knew she had been correct—Adele was not my granddaughter. I heard rumors of faeries and other Downworlders who boasted that they had had their revenge on the Starkweathers, had taken one of their children from them and replaced her with a sickly human. None of my investigations yielded anything concrete, but I was determined to find out where my granddaughter had gone.” He leaned on the mantel. “I had nearly given up when Tessa Gray came to my Institute in the company of your two Shadowhunters. She could have been the ghost of my daughter-in-law, so similar did they look. But she did not appear to have any Shadowhunter blood. It was a mystery, but one I pursued.

“The faerie I interrogated today gave me the last bits of the puzzle. In her infancy my granddaughter was replaced with a kidnapped human child, a sickly creature who died when the Marks were applied, because she was not Nephilim.” There was a hard crack in his voice now, a fissure in the flint. “My granddaughter was left with a mundane family to raise her, their sickly Elizabeth—chosen because of her superficial resemblance to Adele—replaced with our healthy girl. That was the Court’s revenge on me. They believed I had killed their own, so they would kill mine.” His eyes were cold as they rested on Charlotte. “Adele—Elizabeth—grew to womanhood in that mundane family, never knowing what she was. And then she married. A mundane man. His name was Richard. Richard Gray.”