Chain of Gold

“You don’t need a portrait. You are young and beautiful,” Cordelia pointed out.

“Men are not beautiful. Men are handsome,” objected Matthew.

“Thomas is handsome. You are beautiful,” said Cordelia, feeling the imp of the perverse stealing over her. Matthew was looking stubborn. “James is beautiful too,” she added.

“He was a very unprepossessing child,” said Matthew. “Scowly, and he hadn’t grown into his nose.”

“He’s grown into everything now,” Cordelia said.

Matthew laughed, again as if he was surprised to be doing it. “That was a very shocking observation, Cordelia Carstairs. I am shocked.” But his eyes were dancing. “Did James tell you about tomorrow?”

“He did say there was some sort of excursion—a picnic, I think. I am not sure if I am invited, though.”

“Of course you’re invited. I’m inviting you.”

“Oh. Can you do that?”

“I think you’ll find I can do whatever I want, and I usually do.”

“Because the Consul is your mother?” Cordelia said.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve always hoped to meet her,” Cordelia said. “Is she here tonight?”

“No, she’s in Idris,” he said, with a gracious half shrug. “She left a few days ago. It’s unusual for the Consul to live in London—she’s rarely here. The Clave requires her.”

“Oh,” said Cordelia, struggling to hide her disappointment. “How long will she be—”

Matthew spun her in a surprising twirl that left the other dancers looking at them in puzzlement. “You will come to the picnic tomorrow, won’t you?” he said. “It will keep Lucie amused while James moons after Grace. You want Lucie to be happy, don’t you?”

“Of course I do—” Cordelia began, and then, glancing around, realized that she had not seen Lucie in some time. No matter how she craned her head and searched among the dancers, she did not see her friend’s blue dress, or the glint of her brown hair. Puzzled, she turned to Matthew. “But where is she? Where did Lucie go?”

3 THIS LIVING HAND

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again.

—John Keats, “This Living Hand”

It was a bit like the moment in a dream where one realized one was dreaming, only in reverse. When Lucie saw the boy from the forest come into the ballroom, she assumed she was dreaming, and only when her parents began to hurry over toward him and his two companions did she realize that she wasn’t.

In a daze, she pushed through the crowd toward the ballroom doors. As she neared her parents, she recognized the woman they were speaking to, her taffeta dress stretched across bony arms and shoulders, her oversize hat covered with lace, tulle, and a memorable stuffed bird. Tatiana Blackthorn.

Lucie had always been a bit frightened of Tatiana, especially when she had come to their house, demanding that James cut the thorns from her gates. She remembered her as a sort of towering skeleton, but with the passage of years, it seemed that Tatiana had shrunk: still tall, but no longer a giant.

And there beside her was Grace. Lucie recalled her as a determinedly poised child, but she was quite different now. Cold and lovely and statuesque.

But Lucie barely spared them a glance. She was staring at the boy who had come in with them. The changeling boy she had last seen in Brocelind Forest.

He had not altered at all. His hair was still a black spill over his forehead, his eyes the same eerie green. He wore the same clothes he had in the forest: dark trousers and an ivory shirt whose sleeves had been rolled up above his elbows. It was very odd attire for a ball.

He was watching as Tessa and Will greeted Tatiana and Grace, Will bending to kiss Grace’s satin-gloved hand. Oddly, neither of them greeted the boy. As Lucie neared them, her brows drew down into a frown. They were speaking to each other, ignoring him entirely, talking through him as if he weren’t there. How could they be so rude?

Lucie hurried forward, her mouth opening, her gaze fixed on the boy, her boy, her boy from the forest. He raised his head and saw her looking, and to her astonishment, a look of horror passed over his face.

She stopped dead. She could see James making his way through the crowd toward them somewhere in the distance, but the boy was already stepping away from Tatiana and Grace, moving toward Lucie. Speeding toward her, actually, like a runaway horse on Rotten Row.

No one else seemed to see him. No one turned to look at either of them, even when he seized hold of Lucie’s wrist and drew her after him out of the room.

* * *

“Would you do me the honor of this dance?” said James.

He was conscious of the presence of his parents, and of Tatiana Blackthorn, observing everything with her poison-green eyes. He was conscious of the music, continuing around them, and conscious of his own heartbeat, loud as thunder in his ears. He was conscious of all those things, but they seemed distant, as if trapped behind a wall of glass. The only thing that was real in the room was Grace.

James’s parents looked on with concern etched on their faces. He felt a sense of guilt that they must be wondering, now, why he had rushed over to Grace: as far as they knew, he was barely acquainted with her. But the guilt, too, felt distant. They didn’t know what he did. They didn’t know how important this was.

“Well, go on, Grace,” Tatiana said, a beaky smile spreading across her thin face. “Dance with the gentleman.”

Without looking up, Grace put her hand lightly in James’s. They made their way out onto the floor. Touching Grace was like touching adamas for the first time: sparks rocketed through James as he drew her toward him, placing one hand on her shoulder and the other at her waist. She had always been graceful when they had danced, as children, in the overgrown garden of her house in Idris. But she felt different in his arms now.

“Why did you not tell me you were coming?” he said in a low voice.

She finally raised her face and he was struck by a jolt of recognition: Grace might hold herself with near-silent poise, but she felt with an absolute intensity. She was like a fire blazing in the heart of a glacier. “You didn’t come to Idris,” she said. “I waited—I expected you—but you never came.”

“I wrote to you,” he said. “I told you we weren’t coming this summer.”

“Mama found the letter,” she said. “First she hid it from me. I thought you had forgotten—at last I found it in her room. She was dreadfully angry. I told her again we only had a friendship, but—” She shook her head. James was conscious that everyone in the room was staring at them. Even Anna was looking at them curiously through the cheroot smoke that wreathed her like mist off the Thames. “She wouldn’t say what was in it, she just smiled as the days went by and you didn’t come. And I was so frightened. When we are not together, when we are not with one another, the bond between us weakens. I feel it. Don’t you?”

He shook his head. “Love must be able to survive distance,” he said, as gently as he could.

“You don’t understand, James. You have a life here in London, and friends, and I have nothing.” Her voice shook with the strength of her feeling.

“Grace. Don’t say that.” But he thought of the overgrown house full of stopped clocks and rotted food. He had sworn he would help her escape from that.

She slid her hand down his arm. He felt her fingers circle his wrist, below the silver bracelet. Loyalty Binds Me. “I should have trusted you would have written to me,” she whispered. “That you thought of me. I thought about you each night.”

Each night. He knew she meant it innocently, but he felt himself tense. It had been so long since he had last kissed her. He could not remember what it had been like, not exactly, but he knew it had shattered him. “I think of you every day,” he said. “And now that you are here…”

“I never thought it would happen. I never thought I would see London,” she said. “The streets, the carriages, the buildings, it’s all so wonderful. The people…” She looked around the room. There was a look in her eyes, avid, almost hungry. “I cannot wait to know them all.”

“There is an outing tomorrow,” James said. “A group going to Regent’s Park. Would your mother allow you to come?”

Grace’s eyes gleamed. “I think she will,” she said. “She had said she wants me to meet people here in London, and oh—I should like to know your parabatai, Matthew. And Thomas and Christopher that you’ve spoken so much of. I—I should like your friends to like me.”

“Of course,” he murmured, and drew her closer against him. She was light and slim, not nearly as soft and warm as Daisy—

Daisy. Raziel, he’d been dancing with Daisy just a few minutes ago. He couldn’t remember excusing himself. Couldn’t remember leaving her.

He looked away from Grace for the first time and searched the floor for Cordelia. He found her in moments—she was easy to spot. No one else had hair that color, a deep dark red, like fire shining through blood. She was dancing with Matthew, he saw to his surprise. Matthew’s arms were around her, and she was smiling.

Relief went through him. So he hadn’t done her any harm. That was good. He liked Cordelia. He had been glad to see her there among the usual group of girls, knowing he could ask her to dance and she would make no wrong assumptions about his intentions: they were family friends.

The music stopped. It was a pause for refreshments. Couples began to flood off the dance floor—James smiled to himself as he saw Jessamine, the Institute’s resident ghost, drifting above the head of Rosamund Wentworth as Rosamund gossiped with her friends. Jessamine loved overhearing gossip, even though she’d been dead for a quarter century.