Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Prince

“It does make one wonder,” said Tessa. “If the Clave had simply given Mortmain what he wanted—reparations—would he still have become what he did? Would there ever have been a Pandemonium Club at all?”

“Tessa—,” Charlotte began, but Ragnor Fell waved her silent. He gazed amusedly down the table at Tessa. “You’re the shape-changer, aren’t you?” he said. “Magnus Bane told me about you. No mark on you at all, they say.”

Tessa swallowed and looked him straight in the eye. They were discordantly human eyes, ordinary in his extraordinary face. “No. No mark.”

He grinned around his fork. “I do suppose they’ve looked everywhere ?”

“I’m sure Will’s tried,” said Jessamine in a bored tone. Tessa’s silverware clattered to her plate. Jessamine, who had been mashing her peas flat with the side of her knife, looked up when Charlotte let out an aghast, “Jessamine!”

Jessamine shrugged. “Well, he’s like that.”

Fell turned back to his plate with a faint smile on his face. “I remember Will’s father. Quite the ladies’ man, he was. They couldn’t resist him. Until he met Will’s mother, of course. Then he threw it all in and went to live in Wales just to be with her. What a case he was.”

“He fell in love,” said Jem. “It isn’t that peculiar.”

“‘Fell’ into it,” said the warlock, still with the same faint smile. “Hurtled into it is more like. Headlong-crashed into it. Still, there are always some men like that—just one woman for them, and only she will do, or nothing.”

Charlotte looked over at Henry, but he appeared completely lost in thought, counting something—though who knew what—off on his fingers. He was wearing a pink and violet waistcoat today, and had gravy on his sleeve. Charlotte’s shoulders slumped visibly, and she sighed. “Well,” she said. “By all accounts they were very happy together—”

“Until they lost two of their three children and Edmund Herondale gambled away everything they had,” said Fell. “But I imagine you never told young Will about that.”

Tessa exchanged a glance with Jem. My sister is dead, Will had said. “They had three children, then?” she said. “Will had two sisters?”

“Tessa. Please.” Charlotte looked uneasy. “Ragnor . . . I never hired you to invade the privacy of the Herondales, or Will. I did it because I had promised Will I would tell him if harm came to his family.”

Tessa thought of Will—a twelve-year-old Will, clinging to Charlotte’s hand, begging to be told if his family died. Why run? she thought for the hundredth time. Why put them behind you? She had thought perhaps he did not care, but clearly he had cared. Cared still. She could not stop the tightening at her heart as she thought of him calling out for his sister. If he loved Cecily as she had once loved Nate . . .

Mortmain had done something to his family, she thought. As he had to hers. That bound them to each other in a peculiar way, she and Will. Whether he knew it or not.

“Whatever it is that Mortmain has been planning,” she heard herself say, “he has been planning it a long time. Since before I was born, when he tricked or coerced my parents into ‘making’ me. And now we know that years ago he involved himself with Will’s family and moved them to Ravenscar Manor. I fear we are like chess pieces he slides about a board, and the outcome of the game is already known to him.”

“That is what he desires us to think, Tessa,” said Jem. “But he is only a man. And each discovery we make about him makes him more vulnerable. If we were no threat, he would not have sent that automaton to warn us off.”

“He knew exactly where we would be —”

“There is nothing more dangerous than a man bent on revenge,” said Ragnor. “A man who has been bent on it for nearly three score years, who has nurtured it from a tiny, poisonous seed to a living, choking flower. He will see it through, unless you end him first.”

“Then, we will end him,” said Jem shortly. It was as close to a threat as Tessa had ever heard him make.

Tessa looked down at her hands. They were a paler white than they had been when she lived in New York, but they were her hands, familiar, the index finger slightly longer than the middle one, the half-moons of her nails pronounced. I could Change them, she thought. I could become anything, anyone. She had never felt more mutable, more fluid, or more lost.

“Indeed.” Charlotte’s tone was firm. “Ragnor, I want to know why the Herondale family is in that house—that house that belonged to Mortmain—and I want to see to it that they are safe. And I want to do it without Benedict Lightwood or the rest of the Clave hearing about it.”

“I understand. You want me to look out for them as quietly as possible while also making inquiries regarding Mortmain in the area. If he moved them there, it must have been for a purpose.”

Charlotte exhaled. “Yes.”

Ragnor twirled his fork. “That will be expensive.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “I am prepared to pay.”

Fell grinned. “Then, I am prepared to endure the sheep.”

The rest of the lunch passed in awkward conversation, with Jessamine moodily destroying her food without eating it, Jem unusually quiet, Henry muttering equations to himself, and Charlotte and Fell finalizing their plans for the protection of Will’s family. As much as Tessa approved of the idea—and she did—there was something about the warlock that made her uncomfortable in a way Magnus never had, and she was glad when lunch was over and she could escape to her room with a copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

It was not her favorite of the Brontë sisters’ books—that honor went to Jane Eyre, and then Wuthering Heights , with Tenant a distant third—but she had read the other two so many times that no surprises lay between the pages, only phrases so familiar to her they had become like old friends. What she really wanted to read was A Tale of Two Cities , but Will had quoted Sydney Carton to her enough times that she was afraid that picking it up would make her think of him, and make the weight of her nervousness greater. After all, it was never Darnay he quoted, only Sydney, drunk and wrecked and dissipated. Sydney, who died for love.

It was dark out, and the wind was blowing gusts of light rain against the windowpanes when the knock came at her door. It was Sophie, carrying a letter on a silver tray. “A letter for you, miss.”

Tessa put the book down in astonishment. “Mail for me ?”

Sophie nodded and came closer, holding out the tray. “Yes, but it doesn’t say who it’s from. Miss Lovelace almost snatched it, but I managed to keep it from her, nosy thing.”

Tessa took the envelope. It was addressed to her, indeed, in a slanting, unfamiliar hand, printed on heavy cream-colored paper. She turned it over once, began to open it, and caught sight of Sophie’s wide-eyed curious gaze reflected in the window. She turned and smiled at her. “That will be all, Sophie,” she said. It was the way she had read heroines dismissing servants in novels, and it seemed to be correct. With a disappointed look Sophie took her salver and retired from the room.

Tessa unfolded the letter and spread it out on her lap.

Dear sensible Miss Gray,

I write to you on behalf of a mutual friend, one William Herondale. I know that it is his habit to come and go—most often go—from the Institute as he pleases, and that therefore it may be some time before any alarm is raised at his absence. But I ask you, as one who holds your good sense in esteem, not to assume this absence to be of the ordinary sort. I saw him myself last night, and he was, to say the least, distraught when he left my residence. I have reason for concern that he might do himself an injury, and therefore I suggest that his whereabouts be sought and his safety ascertained. He is a difficult young man to like, but I believe you see the good in him, as I do, Miss Gray, and that is why I humbly address my letter to you—