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“Where is she now?” Will said.
“Sanctuary,” said Albert, calming down slightly. “Thought that was best.”
Will nodded, though of course Pangborn couldn’t see him. “It is. Keep her there, Albert.” Tessa was frantically miming drawing on her arm. Will added, “Don’t put any runes on her, though. We don’t know how much demonic magic there might be in her.”
“Amazing what young people get up to today, eh, Will?” Pangborn said. “You know what I mean! The young people! Running wild!”
“I’m one year older than Tatiana,” Will pointed out.
“Why, you’re but a boy!” Albert shouted. “Look, I’ve no idea how you do things in London, but I prefer not to harbor criminals in the Sanctuary of my Institute! Is anyone going to come get this woman?”
“Yes,” Will said. “The Silent Brothers will be on their way shortly, to examine her. Keep her in the Sanctuary until then. No runes, and minimal contact. Stay away from her if you can.”
“Give her what in a can?” Albert shouted, but Will was already hanging up. Without another word, he bent to kiss Tessa, who looked as astonished as everyone else, and walked out of the room.
To contact Jem, of course; James did not have to wonder. He knew his father.
There was a silence. Jesse sat like a statue, his face white, staring at the opposite wall. At last Tessa said, “Perhaps she broke with Belial. She may have—resisted him, or disagreed with him, and he abandoned her.”
“It would be very unlike her to do that,” said Jesse, and there was bitterness in his voice. James could not help but think it would also be very unlike Belial to do that: If Tatiana turned against him, surely he would kill her without a second thought?
“There’s always hope for people, Jesse,” Tessa said. “No one is a lost cause, not even your mother.”
Jesse looked at her, bemused, and James thought, Jesse has never had a kind motherly figure in his life. He’d never known a mother who gave him hope, rather than despair or fear. Now he pushed his chair away from the table and stood up with a small bow. “I think I’d better be alone for a little while,” he said, his voice calm. “I will need to tell Grace this news when I see her tomorrow. But I do very much appreciate the dinner. And the kind words,” he added, and departed.
Lucie said, “Should I go after him, do you think?”
“Not right this moment,” Tessa said. “Sometimes people just need to be by themselves. Poor Tatiana,” she added, to James’s surprise. “I can’t help but wonder if Belial simply took what he wanted from her, all these years, and when he was done, left her to die.”
James wondered if Tessa would still think “poor Tatiana” if she knew what Tatiana had wrought on her own son through Grace. What would she think of how James felt now—the acid burn of bitterness in his throat, the terrible sense of near pleasure in Tatiana’s suffering, which shamed him even as he felt it?
He grabbed for his empty wrist with his hand and held it. No matter how much he wished, he could not tell his parents about the bracelet. His mother always thought the best of everyone, and looking at her face, full of compassionate concern for a loathsome woman who had only ever wished her ill, he could not bring himself to ruin that.
13 ANGELS ALONE
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage:
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
—Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, from Prison”
Cordelia squinted at the page in the fading candlelight.
She was tucked up in her bed in Cornwall Gardens, under the eaves, reading some of the paladin books Christopher had given her. The soft thump of snowdrifts against the roof made the room feel cozier, but it still didn’t feel like home. Rather like a room in the house of a kind relative that one was visiting.
Cordelia was not unaware that she hadn’t entirely unpacked—not her clothes from Paris, and not the things James had sent over to her from Curzon Street. She was living in a sort of limbo, not quite here or there, a space where she did not yet have to make a firm decision.
