Clockwork Prince (15 page)

She turned her face quickly, and his lips brushed her cheek instead of her mouth. He drew back, and she saw his blue eyes open, startled—and hurt. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t know that, Will.” She dropped her voice. “You have made it very clear,” she said, “what kind of use you have for me. You think I am a toy for your amusements. You should not have come in here; it is not proper.”

He dropped his hands. “You called out—”

“Not for you.”

He was silent except for his ragged breathing.

“Do you regret what you said to me that night on the roof, Will? The night of Thomas’s and Agatha’s funeral?” It was the first time either of them had made reference to the incident since it had happened. “Can you tell me you did not mean what you said?”

He bent his head; his hair fell forward, hiding his face. She clenched her own hands into fists at her sides to stop herself from reaching out and pushing it back. “No,” he said, very low. “No, the Angel forgive me, I can’t say that.”

Tessa withdrew, curling in on herself, turning her face away. “Please go away, Will.”

“Tessa—”

“Please.”

There was a long silence. He stood up then, the bed creaking beneath him as he moved. She heard his light tread on the floorboards, and then the door of the bedroom shutting behind him. As if the sound had snapped some cord that held her upright, she fell back against the pillows. She stared up at the ceiling a long time, fighting back in vain against the questions that crowded her mind—What had Will meant, coming to her room like that? Why had he shown her such sweetness when she knew that he despised her? And why, when she knew that he was the worst thing in the world for her, did sending him away seem like such a terrible mistake?

The next morning dawned unexpectedly blue and beautiful, a balm to Tessa’s aching head and exhausted body. After dragging herself from the bed, where she had spent most of the night tossing and turning, she dressed herself, unable to bear the thought of assistance from one of the ancient, half-blind maidservants. As she did up the buttons on her jacket, she caught sight of herself in the room’s old, splotched mirror. There were half-moons of shadow under her eyes, as if they had been smudged there with chalk.

Will and Jem had already gathered in the morning room for a breakfast of half-burned toast, weak tea, jam, and no butter. By the time Tessa arrived, Jem had already eaten, and Will was busy cutting his toast into thin strips and forming rude pictographs out of them.

“What
is
that supposed to be?” Jem asked curiously. “It looks almost like a—” He glanced up, saw Tessa, and broke off with a grin. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” She slid into the seat across from Will; he glanced up at her once as she sat, but there was nothing in his eyes or expression to indicate that he recalled that anything had passed between them the night before.

Jem looked at her with concern. “Tessa, how are you feeling? After last night—” He broke off then, his voice rising, “Good morning, Mr. Starkweather,” he said hastily, jostling Will’s shoulder hard so that Will dropped his fork, and the toast bits slid all over his plate.

Mr. Starkweather, who had swept into the room, still wrapped in the dark cloak he had worn the night before, regarded him balefully. “The carriage is waiting for you in the courtyard,” he said, his clipped diction as tight as ever. “You’d better cut a stick if you want to get back before dinnertime; I’ll be needing the carriage this evening. I’ve told Gottshall to drop you straight at the station on your return, no need for lingering. I trust you’ve gotten everything you need.”

It wasn’t a question. Jem nodded. “Yes, sir. You’ve been very gracious.”

Starkweather’s eyes swept over Tessa again, one last time, before he turned and stalked out of the room, his cloak flapping behind him. Tessa couldn’t get the image of a great black bird of prey—a vulture, perhaps—out of her mind. She thought of the trophy cases full of “spoils,” and shuddered.

“Eat quickly, Tessa, before he changes his mind about the carriage,” Will advised her, but Tessa shook her head.

“I’m not hungry.”

“At least have tea.” Will poured it out for her, and ladled milk and sugar into it; it was much sweeter than Tessa would have liked, but it was so rare that Will made a kind gesture like that—even if it was just to hurry her along—that she drank it down anyway, and managed a few bites of toast. The boys went for their coats and the baggage; Tessa’s traveling cloak, hat, and gloves were located, and they soon found themselves on the front steps of the York Institute, blinking in the watery sunlight.

Starkweather had been as good as his word. His carriage was there, waiting for them, the four
C
s of the Clave painted across the door. The old coachman with the long white beard and hair was already in the driver’s seat, smoking a cheroot; he tossed it aside when he saw the three of them, and sank down farther in his seat, his black eyes glaring out from beneath his drooping eyelids.

“Bloody hell, it’s the Ancient Mariner again,” said Will, though he seemed more entertained than anything else. He swung himself up into the carriage and helped Tessa in after him; Jem was last, shutting the door behind him and leaning out the window to call to the coachman to drive on. Tessa, settling herself in beside Will on the narrow seat, felt her shoulder brush his; he tensed immediately, and she moved away, biting her lip. It was as if last night had never happened and he were back to behaving as if she were poison.

The carriage began moving with a jerk that nearly flung Tessa into Will again, but she braced herself against the window and stayed where she was. The three of them were silent as the carriage rolled down narrow, cobbled Stonegate Street, under a wide sign advertising the Old Star Inn. Both Jem and Will were quiet, Will reviving only to tell her with a ghoulish glee that they were passing through the old walls, under the city entrance where once traitors’ heads had been displayed on spikes. Tessa made a face at him but gave no reply.

Once they had passed the walls, the city quickly gave way to countryside. The landscape was not gentle and rolling, but harsh and forbidding. Green hills dotted with gray gorse swept up into crags of dark rock. Long lines of mortarless stone walls, meant for keeping in sheep, crisscrossed the green; here and there was dotted the occasional lonely cottage. The sky seemed an endless expanse of blue, brushed with the strokes of long gray clouds.

Tessa could not have said how long they had been traveling when the stone chimneys of a large manor house rose in the distance. Jem stuck his head out the window again and called to the driver; the carriage came to a rolling stop.

“But we’re not there yet,” said Tessa, puzzled. “If that’s Ravenscar Manor—”

“We can’t just roll right up to the front door; be sensible, Tess,” said Will as Jem leaped out of the carriage and reached up to help Tessa down. Her boots plashed into the wet, muddy ground as she landed; Will dropped down lightly beside her. “We need to get a look at the place. Use Henry’s device to register demonic presence. Make sure we’re not walking into a trap.”

“Does Henry’s device actually
work
?” Tessa lifted her skirts to keep them out of the mud as the three of them started down the road. Glancing back, she saw the coachman apparently already asleep, leaning back in the driver’s seat with his hat tipped forward over his face. All around them the countryside was a patchwork of gray and green—hills rising starkly; their sides pitted with gray shale; flat sheep-cropped grass; and here and there copses of gnarled, entwined trees. There was a severe beauty to it all, but Tessa shuddered at the idea of living here, so far away from anything.

Jem, seeing her shudder, gave a sideways smile. “City lass.”

Tessa laughed. “I
was
thinking how odd it would be to grow up in a place like this, so far from any people.”

“Where I grew up was not so different from this,” said Will unexpectedly, startling them both. “It’s not so lonely as you might think. Out in the countryside, you can be assured, people visit one another a great deal. They just have a greater distance to traverse than they might in London. And once they arrive, they often make a lengthy stay. After all, why make the trip just to stay a night or two? We’d often have house guests who’d remain for weeks.”

Tessa goggled at Will silently. It was so rare that he ever referred to anything regarding his early life that she sometimes thought of him as someone with no past at all. Jem seemed to be doing the same thing, though he recovered first.

“I share Tessa’s view. I have never lived in anything but a city. I don’t know how I could sleep at night, not knowing I was surrounded by a thousand other sleeping, dreaming souls.”

“And filth everywhere, and everyone breathing down one another’s necks,” countered Will. “When I first arrived in London, I so quickly tired of being surrounded by so many people that it was only with great difficulty that I refrained from seizing the next unfortunate who crossed my path and committing violent acts upon their person.”

“Some might say you retain that problem,” said Tessa, but Will just laughed—a short, nearly surprised sound of amusement—and then stopped, looking ahead of them to Ravenscar Manor.

Jem whistled as Tessa realized why she had been able to see only the tops of the chimneys before. The manor was built in the center of a deep declivity between three hills; their slanting sides rose about it, cradling it as if in the palm of a hand. Tessa, Jem, and Will were poised on the edge of one of the hills, looking down at the manor. The building itself was very grand, a great gray stone pile that gave the impression it had been there for centuries. A large circular drive curved in front of the enormous front doors. Nothing about the place hinted at abandonment or disrepair—no weeds grew over the drive or the paths that led to the stone outbuildings, and no glass was missing from the mullioned windows.

“
Someone’s
living here,” said Jem, echoing Tessa’s thoughts. He began to start down the hill. The grass here was longer, waving almost waist-high. “Perhaps if—”

He broke off as the rattle of wheels became audible; for a moment Tessa thought the carriage driver had come after them, but no, this was quite a different carriage—a sturdy-looking coach that turned into the gate and began rolling toward the manor. Jem crouched down immediately in the grass, and Will and Tessa dropped beside him. They watched as the carriage came to a stop before the manor, and the driver leaped down to open the carriage door.

A young girl stepped out, fourteen or fifteen years old, Tessa guessed—not old enough to have put her hair up, for it blew around her in a curtain of black silk. She wore a blue dress, plain but fashionable. She nodded to the driver, and then, as she started up the manor steps, she paused—paused and looked toward where Jem, Will, and Tessa crouched, almost as if she could see them, though Tessa was sure that they were well hidden by the grass.

The distance was too great for Tessa to make out her features, really—just the pale oval of her face below the dark hair. She was about to ask Jem if he had a telescope with him, when Will made a noise—a noise she had never heard anyone make before, a sick, terrible gasp, as if the air had been punched out of him by a tremendous blow.

But it was not just a gasp, she realized. It was a word; and not just a word, a name; and not just a name, but one she had heard him say before.

“Cecily.”

The door of the great house swung open; the girl disappeared inside. The coach rattled off around the side of the manor to the coach house as Will staggered to his feet. He had gone a sickly gray color, like the ashes of a dead fire.

“Cecily,” he said again. His voice held wonderment, and horror.

“Who on earth is Cecily?” Tessa scrambled into a standing position, brushing grass and thistles from her dress. “Will—”

Jem was already beside Will, his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Will, you must speak to us. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

Will dragged in a long breath. “Cecily—”

“Yes, you’ve said that already,” said Tessa. She heard the sharpness in her own voice, and softened it with an effort. It was unkind to speak so to someone so obviously distraught, even if he did insist on staring into space and muttering “Cecily” at intervals.

It hardly mattered; Will seemed not to have heard her. “My sister,” he said. “Cecily. She was—Christ, she was nine years old when I left.”

“Your sister,” said Jem, and Tessa felt a loosening of something tight around her heart, and cursed herself inwardly for it. What did it matter whether Cecily was Will’s sister or someone he was in love with? It had nothing to do with her.

Will started down the hill, not looking for a path, just tramping blindly among the heather and furze. After a moment Jem went after him, catching at his sleeve. “Will, don’t—”

Will tried to pull his arm away. “If Cecily’s there, then the rest of them—my family—they must be there as well.”

Tessa hurried to catch up with them, wincing as she nearly turned an ankle on a loose rock. “But it doesn’t make any sense that your family would be here, Will. This was Mortmain’s house. Starkweather said so. It was in the papers—”

“I
know
that,” Will half-shouted.