Chain of Iron

“Reading this?” he said. There was an odd note in his voice, and an odder look on his face. A look she hadn’t seen before, a sort of shadow cast across his fine features. “I can see why.”

“Jesse—”

She reached out a hand, but he’d already picked up a page. To her horror, he began reading aloud from it, his voice stiff:



“The Brave Lucinda clasped her hands before her. Did her eyes deceive her? But no! It was indeed her beloved, Sir Jethro, returned from the war. Truly he seemed weary and war-torn, his brightly blazoned armor daubed with blood—no doubt the blood of the innumerable poltroons he’d slain upon the battlefield. But these marks of battle only made his beauty shine more brightly. His black hair gleamed, his green eyes shone as she ran toward him.

‘My darling, you are alive,’ she cried.

He clasped her face between his cold hands. ‘I am not alive. I am a ghost, and only you can see me.’

‘It does not matter!’ cried Lucinda. ‘Alive or dead, I love you still!’ ”

 

Lucie snatched the page out of his hand. She was breathing hard. “Stop,” she said. “Stop reading.”

He rose to his feet. “I see why you didn’t want me to see this. I suppose it could be that you are mocking me—”

She stared at him. There was an angry shape to his mouth that seemed to change his whole face—or was it just that she had never seen him furious before? “No—how could you think that?”

“Clearly I am something of a joke to you, or my situation is.” There was still that awful curl to his mouth. That cold note in his voice. Yet through her humiliation, Lucie felt a spark of anger light.

“That is not true,” she said. “It is a story. And while there are—similarities—between Lord Jethro and you, it is only what writers do. We model bits and pieces of characters on what we see in real life. It means nothing.”

“You are right,” he said harshly. “That boy in the book is not me. I don’t know who he is—he is your imagined fantasy, Lucie.”

With shaking hands, Lucie crumpled the page of her book into a ball and threw it to the floor. “It’s just writing. Making a story.”

“It is quite clear that if I were not a ghost, I would be of little interest to you. Just a boy who hadn’t lived much, and died unheroically,” he said. He began to pace, his footsteps utterly soundless. She could see through him partially, through his shoulder as he turned. As if he were losing strength, she thought, chilled; losing the ability to appear solid and whole. “You want to create a story in which I died in battle, or perished nobly. Not foolishly, weakly, getting my first Mark.”

She glanced at the glass over her vanity table: she saw herself, very pale, her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her. And where Jesse stood, not even a ripple in the air. She tore her eyes away from the reflection.

“No,” she said. “I care for you just as you are, the way you are. The book is a kind of truth, but is not what we are. Cruel Prince James isn’t James. Matthew isn’t a collection of ice goblins in spats. And Princess Lucinda isn’t me. I made her far braver, more clever, more resourceful than I am.” She took a deep, terrifying breath. “Princess Lucinda would have told you she loved you, a long time before now.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t confuse what you feel with the stories you’re writing. You do not love me. It is not possible.”

Lucie wanted to stamp her foot on the floor but restrained herself. “I know what I feel,” she snapped. “You cannot dictate such things, nor tell me what is possible!”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “When I am with you, I imagine that my heart is beating, though it has not beaten for seven years. You give me so much, and I can give you nothing at all.” He caught up a handful of papers from her desk. “I told myself you felt nothing for me, any more than you would feel for—for a portrait, or a photograph of someone who had once lived and breathed. If I told myself lies, then this is my fault. All of it. And I must put an end to it.”

Lucie reached out, as if she could catch at his sleeve. “What if I commanded you?” she said, her voice harsh in her own ears. “To forget you’d ever read the book? What if—”

“No,” he said, and now he looked absolutely furious. “You must never command a ghost unless they ask you to do so!”

“But, Jesse—”

She could hardly see him clearly now: he had begun to fade, to blur around the edges. “I cannot, I will not stay,” he snapped. “Unless you command me, of course. Is that what you want? To force me to stay?”

Wordless, Lucie shook her head. And Jesse vanished, leaving the white pages of her book to flutter slowly to the floor.

 

James sat before the fire in his bedroom, letting the light from the flames play over his hands, creating pattern and shadow.

He could not sleep; Cordelia had begged off chess the moment they’d returned home, and indeed, she’d looked strained and exhausted. James felt bitterly angry with himself.

He had not broken his agreement with Cordelia—he had spoken to Grace briefly, and only about Amos Gladstone’s death. She had told him to be careful. All perfectly proper, but he knew he must have seemed stricken when Grace had walked into the room. Cordelia had been stunned. He must have looked awful; she was usually so cheerful and unflappable.

He hadn’t even wanted to go tonight: it had been three full days that he’d hardly ventured out the door of his own home. Nominally, the weather had kept him inside; it had been blowing freezing sleet since Tuesday. But he had to admit: had he still lived at the Institute, he would have dragged himself out of doors, grumpy as a wet cat, to join his friends in the damp rooms above the Devil.

But staying at home with Daisy—he’d told her marriage would be a lark, and meant it, but he was enjoying it more than he’d imagined he would. He found he looked forward to seeing her at breakfast so as to tell her what he’d thought about during the night, and at night to hear what she’d thought about since breakfast. They saw their friends during the day, but he loved their evenings alone together, when they matched their wits over games, made and lost bets, and talked about anything and everything.

He recalled, when he was a boy and the whole family had gathered in the drawing room, seeing an expression on his father’s face that James always thought of as the Quiet Look. Will’s blue gaze would travel over his wife—tracing every line of her as if he were memorizing her all over again—and then his children, and a look of happiness that was sharp and gentle at the same time would come over his face.

James knew now, though, what his father had been thinking when he got the Quiet Look. It was the same thought he had in the study at night, watching the light of the fire pass through Cordelia’s unbound red hair, listening to her laugh, seeing the graceful movements of her hands in the warm lamplight. How do I live in this moment forever, and not let it go?

Would it be like that with Grace, when they were married? James wondered. He had never felt comfortable around Grace as he did around Cordelia. Perhaps that was the difference between love and friendship. Friendship was more easy, more relaxed.