She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Witch-Wife”
As the carriage rolled under the Institute’s gates, James saw his parents standing in the courtyard. His father was in a cutaway morning coat and a blue sapphire tiepin that Tessa had given him for their twentieth anniversary. Tessa herself wore a formal day dress. They were clearly prepared to go out.
“And where have you been?” Will demanded, as James clambered out of the carriage. The others leaped down behind him, the girls, being in gear, needing no help to dismount. “You stole our carriage.”
James wished he could tell his father the truth, but that would be breaking their sworn promise to Ragnor.
“It’s only the second-best carriage,” James protested.
“Remember when Papa stole Uncle Gabriel’s carriage? It’s a proud family tradition,” said Lucie, as the group of them approached the Institute steps.
“I did not raise you to be horse thieves and scallywags,” said Will. “And I recall very clearly that I told you—”
“Thank you for letting them borrow the carriage to come and get me,” said Cordelia. Her eyes were wide, and she looked entirely innocent. James felt an amused stab of surprise: she was an interestingly skillful liar. At least his parents wouldn’t wonder why they were all in gear: as James and Lucie had left the house earlier, Will had said to them that for years he’d trusted them to patrol in the darkness, but now they must arm themselves at all times, treating day as if it were night. He’d also advised James to bring Matthew with him, which James had been planning to do anyway. “I had very much wanted to come to the Institute and see what I could do to help.”
Will softened immediately. “Of course. You are always welcome here, Cordelia. Though we are, as you can see, going out—Charles has invoked the Consul’s authority and called a meeting in Grosvenor Square to discuss last night’s attack. Only for high-level Enclave members, apparently.”
Matthew grimaced. “By the Angel, that sounds awful. I hope it’s all right for me to stay here tonight.”
Tessa smiled. “We already made up one of the spare rooms for you.”
“As I have known Charles since he was born, I have a difficult time taking him seriously as an authority figure,” said Will thoughtfully. “I suppose if he says anything I don’t like, I can request that he be spanked.”
“Oh, yes, please,” said Matthew. “It would do him a world of good.”
“Will—” began Tessa in exasperation, just as Bridget emerged from the front doors. She appeared to be carrying an enormous medieval spear: its haft was worn, its long iron point spotted with rust. She clambered into the driver’s seat of the carriage and sat grimly, clearly awaiting Tessa and Will.
“I do hope you’re going to glamour that carriage,” said James. “People will think the Romans have returned to reconquer the British Isles.”
Tessa and Will climbed into the carriage. As Bridget gathered up the reins, Tessa leaned out the window. “Uncle Jem is in the infirmary with several other Silent Brothers, looking after the ill,” she called. “Please try not to cause them any trouble, and see to it that they have whatever they need.”
James nodded as the carriage rolled out of the courtyard. He knew there would be guards around the Institute as well; he had seen a few of them, marked out clearly in their black gear, outside the gates as they approached. His parents had been through too much to ever leave the Institute unguarded.
He glanced at his sister, wondering if she was thinking the same. She stood looking up at the higher levels of the Institute—perhaps at the sickroom? He was used to a Lucie in motion, not a Lucie who stood pale and withdrawn, clearly lost in thought.
“Come along then, Luce,” he said. “Let’s get inside.”
She frowned at him. “No need to use your worried voice. I’m perfectly all right, James.”
He threw an arm around her shoulder. “It’s not every day you see a warlock scattered liberally around his own bedroom,” he said. “You might as well take a little time to recover. Raziel knows none of us have had much time to recover from anything lately.”
In fact, James thought, as the four of them approached the Institute, he had barely had a moment all day to think of Grace. His mother always said the cure for worry was to throw yourself into activity, and he had certainly done that, but he could not leave things this way with Grace forever. He had not realized how bad the situation with Tatiana actually was. Surely Grace would reach out, and together they would remove her to a place of safety.
Surely it would happen soon.
“So, Jessamine,” said Lucie. “Can ghosts lie?”
They were all in Lucie’s room: Matthew and James had settled Lucie on the settee and wrapped her in blankets, despite her complaints that she was fine and needed no assistance. James had insisted that he hadn’t liked how pale she’d looked when she’d come out of Gast’s flat.
Cordelia was next to Lucie on the sofa, while James and Matthew occupied the two armchairs as only young men did: legs and armed sprawled everywhere, gear jackets tossed casually on the bed, muddy boots mussing up the carpet. Both were gazing up at Jessamine, though only James could see her.
“Certainly not!” Jessamine looked shifty. “Ghosts are completely honest. I keep telling you, it was mice who knocked your silver mirror behind the desk and broke it.”
“It appears clear that if ghosts are liars, they are terrible liars,” said James.
Matthew sighed. “It is very strange to see you conversing with the invisible.”
“Humph,” said Jessamine. She wobbled a bit and firmed up, her outlines clearing as she drifted down toward the floor. Shadowhunters, having the Sight, could generally see ghosts who wanted to be seen, but Lucie knew it was an effort for Jessamine to make herself visible to all eyes.
“Oh!” said Cordelia. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jessamine. Lucie speaks of you often.”
Jessamine beamed.
“You are a very attractive ghost,” said Matthew, tapping his ringed fingers against his chest. “I do hope Lucie and James have mentioned as much.”
“They have not,” Jessamine noted.
“Very remiss,” said Matthew, his eyes sparkling.
“You are not at all like Henry,” said Jessamine, eyeing Matthew speculatively. “He was forever setting things on fire, and not a compliment to be heard.”
“Jessamine,” Lucie said. “This is important! Do tell us, can ghosts lie? Not you, of course, my dear.”
“Ghosts can lie,” Jessamine conceded. “But there are certain forms of necromancy that can compel them to tell the truth, and even to allow the living to control them.” She shuddered. “That is why necromancy is so dreadful and forbidden.”
“That’s why?” Cordelia sounded doubtful. Turning to Lucie, she said, “Are you worried Gast’s ghost might have been lying?”
Lucie hesitated. Part of her hoped he had been lying, since he had claimed the demon was only meant to kill Shadowhunters. It was a frightening thought. “I just don’t want us to go off on a wild-goose chase. Gast was insistent that someone extraordinarily powerful hired him to summon these demons. We need to find out who that was.”
“We also need to know what kind of demons these are,” said Cordelia. “We cannot go to the Enclave just to report that Gast raised a bunch of poisonous demons: we already know these demons bear poison. We do not know why their poison is so deadly, or what Gast did so they can appear in daylight.”
“This all seems very dull,” said Jessamine. “If you don’t need me, I’ll be going.” She vanished with a sigh of relief, no doubt at no longer having to keep herself in visible form.
Lucie reached up to pull down one of her writing notebooks from the edge of the desk. Perhaps it was time to begin recording their thoughts. “There is another odd thing. We know Gast raised multiple demons, but he kept referring to one demon. He said he raised it, not them.”
“Perhaps the demon had offspring,” James suggested. “Some demons have dozens of spawn, like spiders—”
From outside Lucie’s window came the rattle of wheels and the neighing of horses. A moment later there was the sound of cries from the courtyard. James and Lucie both rushed to the window.
A driverless carriage had drawn up before the Institute’s front steps. Lucie recognized the arms on the side instantly: the four Cs of the Consul. It was Charles Fairchild’s carriage.
The carriage door flew open and Grace tumbled out, her hair streaming over her shoulders, her dress stained with blood. She was screaming.
Beside Lucie, James’s body tensed like iron.
The front doors of the Institute burst open and Brother Enoch came rushing down the steps. He reached into the carriage behind Grace and lifted out the twitching body of a woman, clad in a stained fuchsia dress. Her arm was bloody, wrapped in a makeshift bandage.
Tatiana Blackthorn.
Cordelia and Matthew had joined them at the window. Cordelia had her hand over her mouth. “By the Angel,” said Matthew. “Another attack.”
Lucie turned to tell James to hurry to Grace, but there was no need to say it. He was already gone.
James burst into the infirmary to find a scene of horror. Screens had been put up between the beds along the west wall where the sick lay in their poisoned sleep. James could see only their silhouettes—dark shapes hunched under covers, still as corpses. At the far end of the room two beds had been pushed together: Tatiana had been carried across the room, and blood smeared the floor in a trail leading to where she lay sprawled crosswise upon them, her body jerking and twisting. Her shoulder had been torn, and her arm; her hat had come off, and the thin tufts of her graying hair were matted to her skull.
Brother Enoch was bending over Tatiana, dripping dark blue fluid from a beaker into her open mouth as she gasped for air. James thought wildly of a baby bird being fed by its mother. Jem stood by, holding bandages soaked in antiseptic. Grace knelt in the shadows by the foot of her mother’s bed, her hands gripping each other tightly.
James approached, passing the beds in which the other patients lay in their restless drugged states. Ariadne, Vespasia, and Gerald might have been only sleeping, had it not been for the dark maps of black veins beneath their skin. They seemed to grow more visible by the day.
Hello, James.
It was Jem’s voice, gentle in his mind. James wished he had something to tell his uncle, other than the frustrating threads of a mystery that refused to knit itself together. But Jem was already searching out the identity of James’s grandfather. He couldn’t burden Jem with more questions that might have no answers.
Will she live? he asked silently, indicating Tatiana.
Jem’s voice was unusually strained. If she dies, it will not be because of these injuries you see here.
The poison. Death-dealer, poisoner of life, Gast had said. But what in the Angel’s name had he raised?
“James.” A hand caught at his arm; he looked down to see Grace, her face ashen, her lips deadly white. She was gripping his arm with both hands. “Take me out of here.”
He turned slightly to shield them both from view. “Where shall I take you? What do you need?”
Her hands trembled, shaking his arm. “I need to talk to you, James. Take me somewhere we can be alone.”
“James has been gone for an absolute age,” Lucie said. She had been scribbling in her notebook, but had begun to look worried. “Would you go and look for him, Cordelia?”
Cordelia did not want to go look for James. She’d seen the look on his face when Grace tumbled out of Charles’s carriage in the courtyard. The longing that had turned so quickly to fear for Grace; the quick unconscious way he’d touched the bracelet on his wrist. He hated Tatiana, she knew, and with good reason. But he would have done anything to protect her to spare Grace pain.
She wondered what it would be like, to be loved like that. Even alongside her sadness, there was a strange admiration in her for the way that James loved Grace, the all-encompassingness of it.
That didn’t mean she wanted to barge in on James and his lady love. But Lucie had asked, and Cordelia could see no reason to refuse. She smiled weakly. “I’m not sure I’m meant to leave you alone with a man,” she said. “Seems scandalous.”
Lucie chuckled. “Matthew’s not a man. We used to hit each other with soup ladles as children.”
Cordelia rather expected Matthew to laugh too, but instead he looked away, suddenly occupied with a spot of dirt on his sleeve. With a silent sigh, Cordelia ruffled Lucie’s hair and went out into the corridor.
She was still learning her way around the Institute. The symbols for Shadowhunter families were everywhere and as Cordelia passed them, witchlight touched the shapes of wings and the curves of towers. Cordelia found a set of stone steps and headed down it, only to jump in surprise as Anna Lightwood stepped out from beneath a marble frieze of an angel poised over a green hill. The dragon of Wales was pictured in the background.
Anna was in trousers and a jacket of sharp French tailoring. Her blue eyes were the exact color of Will’s, darker than Lucie’s: they matched her waistcoat, and the lapis head of her walking stick.
“Have you seen James?” Cordelia demanded without preamble.
“No,” said Anna shortly. “No clue as to his whereabouts, I’m afraid.”
Cordelia frowned, not because of James, but because of Anna’s expression. “Anna? What’s wrong?”
Anna scowled. “I had come here to horsewhip Charles, but it appears that he is elsewhere.”
“Charles Fairchild?” Cordelia echoed blankly. “I believe he’s at home—he called a gathering at his house for high-ranking Enclave members. You could go horsewhip him there, but it would make for a very strange meeting.”
“High-ranking Enclave members?” Anna rolled her eyes. “Well, no wonder I don’t know about it. So I suppose I’ll have to wait until later to puncture him like the pustulant boil he is.” Anna began to pace within the small confines of the stairwell. “Charles,” she said. “Bloody Charles, everything in service of his ambitions—” She whirled, slamming her walking stick against a stair. “He has done a dreadful, dreadful thing. I need to go to the infirmary. She shouldn’t be alone. I must see her.”
“See who?” Cordelia was bewildered.
“Ariadne,” said Anna. “Cordelia—would you accompany me to the sickroom?”
Cordelia looked at Anna in surprise. Elegant, composed Anna. Though at the moment her hair was mussed, her cheeks flushed. She looked younger than she usually did.
“Of course,” Cordelia said.
Fortunately, Anna knew the way to the infirmary: they did not speak as they climbed the stairs, both lost in thought. The infirmary itself was much quieter than it had been the last time Cordelia was there. She did not recognize most of those who lay still and feverish in the beds. At the back of the room, a large screen had been pulled out to shield the patient there: Tatiana Blackthorn, presumably. Cordelia could see the silhouettes of Brother Enoch and Jem cast against the screen as they moved around Tatiana’s bed.
Anna’s attention was focused on a single patient. Ariadne Bridgestock lay quietly against the white pillows. Her eyes were shut, and her rich brown skin was ashen, stretching tightly over the branching black veins beneath her skin. Beside her bed was a small table on which lay a roll of bandages and several stoppered jars of different-colored potions.
Anna slipped in between the screens surrounding Ariadne’s cot, and Cordelia followed, feeling slightly awkward. Was she intruding? But Anna looked up, as if to assure herself that Cordelia was there, before she knelt down at the side of Ariadne’s bed, laying her walking stick on the floor.
Anna’s bowed shoulders looked strangely vulnerable. One of her hands dangled at her side: she reached out the other, fingers moving slowly across the white linen sheets, until she was almost touching Ariadne’s hand.
She did not take it. At the last moment, Anna’s fingers curled and dropped to rest, beside Ariadne but not quite touching. In a low and steady voice, Anna said, “Ariadne. When you wake up—and you will wake up—I want you to remember this. It was never a sign of your worth that Charles Fairchild wanted to marry you. It is a measure of his lack of worth that he chose to break it off in such a manner.”
“He broke it off?” Cordelia whispered. She was stunned. The breaking off of a promised engagement was a serious matter, undertaken usually only when one of the parties in question had committed some kind of serious crime or been caught in an affair. For Charles to break his promise to Ariadne while she lay unconscious was appalling. People would assume he had found out something dreadful about Ariadne. When she awoke, she might be ruined.
Anna did not reply to Cordelia. She only raised her head and looked at Ariadne’s face, a long look like a touch.
“Please don’t die,” she said, in a low voice, and rose to her feet. Catching up her walking stick, she strode from the infirmary, leaving Cordelia staring after her in surprise.
Lucie set her notebook aside. Matthew was drawing circles in the air with a forefinger and frowning lazily, as if he were a pasha looking over his court and finding them to be ill-mannered and unprepared for inspection.
“How are you, Luce?” he said. He had moved to sit beside her on the settee. “Tell the truth.”
“How are you, Matthew?” Lucie retorted. “Tell the truth.”
“I am not the one who saw the ghost of Gast,” said Matthew, and grinned. “Sounds like an unfinished Dickens novel, doesn’t it? The Ghost of Gast.”
“I am not the one who nearly tumbled off a rope I should easily have been able to climb,” said Lucie quietly.
Matthew’s eyes narrowed. They were extraordinary eyes, so dark you could only tell they were green if you stood close to him. And Lucie had, many times. They were close now, close enough that she could see the slight scruff of golden hair along his jawline, and the shadows under his eyes.
“That reminds me,” he said, and rolled up his sleeve. There was a long graze along his forearm. “I could use an iratze.” He aimed a winning smile at her. All Matthew’s smiles were winning. “Here,” he added, and held out his stele to her. “Use mine.”
She reached to take it from him, and for a moment, his hand closed gently around hers. “Lucie,” he said softly, and she almost closed her eyes, remembering how he had put his coat around her in the street, the warmth of his touch, the faint scent of him, brandy and dry leaves.
But mostly brandy.
She looked down at their entwined hands, his more scarred than hers. The rings on his fingers. He began to turn her hand over in his, as if he meant to kiss her palm.
“You are a Shadowhunter, Matthew,” she said. “You should be able to scale a wall.”
He sat back. “And I am,” he said. “My new boots were slippery.”
“It wasn’t your boots,” said Lucie. “You were drunk. You’re drunk now, too. Matthew, you’re drunk most of the time.”
He released her hand as if she had struck him. There was confusion in his eyes, and visible hurt as well. “I am not—”
“Yes, you are. You think I can’t recognize it?”
Matthew’s mouth hardened into a narrow line. “Drink makes me amusing.”
“It does not amuse me to watch you hurt yourself,” she said. “You are like a brother to me, Math—”
He flinched. “Am I? No one else has such complaints about what I do, or my desire for fortification.”
“Many are afraid to mention it,” said Lucie. “Others, like my brother and my parents, do not see what they do not want to see. But I see, and I am worried.”
His lip curled at the corner. “Worried about me? I’m flattered.”
“I am worried,” said Lucie, “that you will get my brother killed.”
Matthew did not move. He remained as still as if he had been turned to stone by the Gorgon in the old stories. The Gorgon was a demon, Lucie’s father had told her, though in those days there were no Shadowhunters. Instead gods and demigods had walked on the earth, and miracles had showered down from the heavens like leaves from a tree in autumn. But there was no miracle here. Only the fact that she might as well have stabbed Matthew in the heart.
“You are his parabatai,” said Lucie, her voice shaking slightly. “He trusts you—to be at his back in battle, to be his shield and sword, and if you are not yourself—”
Matthew stood up, nearly upending the chair. His eyes were dark with fury. “If it were anyone else but you, Lucie, saying these things to me—”
“Then what?” Lucie also rose to her feet. She barely reached Matthew’s shoulder, but she glared at him anyway. She had always given as good as she got in the soup ladle battles of their childhood. “What would you do?”
He slammed his way out of her room without replying.
In the end, James brought Grace to the drawing room.
It was quiet in there, and deserted: there was a fire on, and he helped her into a chair close to it, bending to draw off her gloves. He wanted to kiss her bare hands—so vulnerable, so familiar from their days and nights in the woods—but he stepped back and left her alone to warm herself by the flames. It was not a cold day, but shock could make one shiver down to one’s bones.
The light from the flames danced over the William Morris wallpaper and the deep colors of the Axminster rugs that covered the wooden floor. At last Grace rose to her feet and began to pace up and down in front of the fire. She had pulled the last pins from her hair, and it streamed over her shoulders like icy water.
“Grace?” Now, in this room, with only the sound of the ticking clock breaking the silence, James hesitated, as he had not had time or pause to do in the infirmary. “Can you speak of what happened? Where was the attack? How did you escape?”
“Mama was attacked at the manor,” said Grace, her voice flat. “I do not know how it happened. I found her unconscious at the bottom of the front steps. The wounds in her shoulder and arm were the wounds of teeth.”
“I am so sorry.”
“You don’t have to say that,” said Grace. She had begun to pace again. “There are things you don’t know, James. And things I must do, now that she is sick. Before she wakes.”
“I am glad you think she will recover,” said James, coming close to her. He was not sure if he should reach to touch her, even as she stopped pacing and raised her eyes to his. He did not think he had seen Grace like this before. “It is important to have hope.”
“It is certainty. My mother will not die,” said Grace. “All these years she has lived on bitterness, and her bitterness will keep her alive now. It is stronger than death.” She reached to caress his face. He closed his eyes as her fingertips traced the contour of his cheekbone, light as the touch of a dragonfly’s wing.
“James,” she said. “Oh, James. Open your eyes. Let me look at you while you still love me.”
His eyes flew open. “I have loved you for years. I will always love you.”
“No,” said Grace, dropping her hand. There was a great weariness on her face, in her movements. “You will hate me soon.”
“I could never hate you,” James said.
“I am getting married,” she said.
It was the sort of shock so immense one hardly felt it. She’s made some kind of mistake, James thought. She’s confused. I will fix this.
“I will be marrying Charles,” she went on. “Charles Fairchild. We have been spending quite a bit of time together since I came to London, though I know you have not noticed it.”
A pulse had started to pound behind James’s eyes, in time with the ticking of the grandfather clock. “This is madness, Grace. You asked me to marry you last night.”
“And you said no. You were very clear.” She gave a slight shrug. “Charles said yes.”
“Charles is engaged to Ariadne Bridgestock.”
“That engagement is broken. Charles told Inquisitor Bridgestock he was ending it this morning. Ariadne did not love Charles; she will not care whether they marry or not.”
“Really? Did you ask her?” James demanded fiercely, and Grace flinched. “None of this makes sense, Grace. You’ve been in London less than a week—”
Her eyes glittered. “I can get a great deal accomplished in less than a week.”
“Apparently. Including harming Ariadne Bridgestock, who has never done anything to you. Charles is a cold person. He has a cold heart. But I would have expected better from you than to be a party to something like this.”
Grace flushed. “You think Ariadne is desperate? She is beautiful and rich, and Charles is prepared to tell everyone she broke it off with him.”
“While she was unconscious?”
“Clearly, he will say it was before she fell ill,” Grace snapped.
“And if she dies, how convenient for you,” said James, pain like a white flare behind his eyes.
“I told you that you would hate me,” said Grace, and there was something almost savage in her expression. “I tell you, she does not want Charles, and if she dies, yes, she will need him even less than she does now!” She gasped for breath. “You cannot see it. I am more desperate than Ariadne could ever be.”
“I cannot see what you will not tell me,” said James in a low voice. “If you are desperate, let me help you—”
“I offered you the chance to help me,” she said. “I asked you to marry me, but you would not have it. Everything you have here, it is all more important to you than I am.”
“That’s not true—”
She laughed sharply. “To love me, James, you must love me above all other things. We will forever be my mother’s target if we marry—and then our children will be—and how could that be worth it to you? I already know it is not. When I asked you to marry me last night, it was only a test. I wished to see if you loved me enough. Enough to do anything to protect me. You do not.”
“And Charles does?” James’s voice was low. “You barely know him.”
“It doesn’t matter. Charles has power. He will be the Consul. He does not need to love me.” She faced him across the worn pattern of the carpet. “I must do this now, before my mother wakes. She would forbid it. But if she wakes and it is done, she will not go against the Clave and Consul. Don’t you see? It is impossible between us, James.”
“It is only impossible if you make it so,” said James.
Grace drew her shawl around her shoulders as if she were cold. “You do not love me enough,” she said. “You will realize that soon and be grateful I have done this.” She held her hand out. “Please return my bracelet to me.”
It was like the lash of a whip. Slowly James reached for the clasp of the silver circlet. It had rested there so long that when he removed it, he saw a strip of paler flesh circling his wrist, like the pallor left behind when a wedding ring was removed. “Grace,” he said, holding it out to her. “You don’t need to do this.”
She took the bracelet from him, leaving his wrist feeling unnaturally bare. “What we had was the dream of children,” she said. “It will fade like snow in summer. You will forget.”
His head felt as if his skull were cracking; he could barely breathe. He heard his own voice as if it came from a long distance away. “I am a Herondale. We love but once.”
“That is only a story.”
“Haven’t you heard?” James said bitterly. “All the stories are true.”
He flung the door open, desperate to get away from her. As he raced down the hall, the faces of strangers flew by in a blur; he heard his own name called and then he was down the stairs and in the entryway, seizing up his coat. The sky was cloudy overhead and shadows had gathered thickly in the courtyard, resting among the branches of the trees like ravens.
“Jamie—”
Matthew appeared out of the dimness, his hair bright in the dark entryway, his expression concerned. “Jamie, what’s wrong?”
“Grace is marrying Charles,” said James. “Let it be, Math. I need to be alone.”
Before Matthew could say a word, James threw open the doors and fled, vanishing beneath the arched gates that marked the entrance to the Institute, the words carved on them gleaming in the dull sunlight.
We are dust and shadows.
Matthew swore, his fingers fumbling at the buttons of his coat. James had just vanished into the shadows outside the Institute without a single weapon on him, but Matthew was sure he could catch him up. He knew James’s haunts as well as James knew them himself: all the places in the city James might seek out when he was upset.
His hands were shaking too badly to get the buttons right, though. He swore again and reached for the flask in his waistcoat. Just a nip to steady his hands and put him to rights—
“Was James—did he seem all right?” said a voice behind him.
Matthew turned, dropping his hand. Grace stood at the foot of the steps, a gray shawl like a spider’s web wrapped around her thin shoulders. Matthew knew she was thought strikingly beautiful by most, but she had always seemed like the shadow of a shadow to him, lacking vibrancy and color.
“Of course he isn’t all right,” Matthew said. “Neither am I. You’re marrying Charles, and none of us wants that.”
She pulled the shawl tighter about herself. “You don’t understand. We all do what we must. I am doing what I have to do.”
“James has loved you, sincerely, since he was a child,” said Matthew. “And now you tear his heart to pieces? And for what? Charles will never feel half of what James feels for you.”
“Feelings,” she said with contempt. “That is all men think women want, isn’t it? Sympathy—sentiment—nonsense. I have never felt any tenderness for anything or anyone living—”
“Have you truly never felt anything for anyone?” Matthew demanded, half-angry and half-curious.
She was silent for a long moment. “My brother,” she said at last, with a peculiar half smile. “But then, he is not now living.”
“So you never cared for James at all,” he said, full realization dawning slowly. “Has James disappointed you in some way? Or were you just tired of him before you even came to London? All the time you’ve spent with Charles, all the bloody carriage rides, all the whispering in corners—Lord, you planned this like a military campaign, didn’t you? If the first regiment falls, always have a replacement at the ready.” He laughed bitterly. “I told myself I was a fool for being suspicious that you were going behind James’s back. I didn’t imagine half the truth.”
She looked paler than usual. “You would not be wise to spread such rumors. Let it be, Matthew.”
“I cannot.” He started in on his coat again; oddly his hands were steady, as if anger had flattened his nerves. “Charles is a bastard, but even he doesn’t deserve—”
“Matthew,” she said, coming closer and laying her hand on his elbow. He paused in surprise, looking at her face, upturned to his. He could see that the shape of it was indeed lovely, almost doll-like in its perfection.
She stroked her hand down his sleeve. He told himself he should pull back from her, but his feet seemed rooted to the floor. It was as if he were being drawn toward her, though he hated her at the same time.
“You feel something for me now, don’t you?” said Grace. “Kiss me. I demand that you do.”
As if in a dream, Matthew reached for her. He grasped Grace’s slim waist in his hands. He pressed his hungry mouth against her lips and kissed her, and kissed her. She tasted of sweet tea and oblivion. He felt nothing, no desire, no yearning, only an empty desperate compulsion. He kissed her mouth and her cheek and she turned in his arms, still holding his wrist, her body against his—
And then she stepped back, releasing him. It was like waking from a dream.
He flinched back in horror, stumbling away from Grace. There was nothing timid in that glance, nothing of the girl with her face downcast at the ball. The color of her eyes had turned to steel.
“You—” he began, and broke off. He couldn’t say what he wanted to say: You made me do that. It was ludicrous, a bizarre abdication of personal responsibility for an even more bizarre act.
When she spoke, her voice held no emotion. Her lips were red where he had kissed her; he felt like being sick. “If you get in my way after this, if you do anything to impede my marriage to Charles, I will tell James you kissed me. And I will tell your brother, too.”
“As if they do not already know I am a terrible person,” he said, with a bravado he did not feel.
“Oh, Matthew.” Her voice was cold as she turned away from him. “You have no idea what terrible people are like.”