The Infernal Devices 01 - Clockwork Angel (15 page)

Behind the desk sat a man, who rose to his feet as they entered. He was a small energetic-looking figure, a middle-aged man with hair graying suitably at the sideburns. His skin looked windburned, as if he had often been outside in rough weather. His eyes were a very, very light gray, his expression pleasant; despite his elegant, expensive-looking clothes, it was easy to imagine him on the deck of a ship, peering keenly into the distance. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Walker gave me to understand that you are looking for Mr. Nathaniel Gray?”

“Yes,” Henry said, to Charlotte’s surprise. Henry rarely, if ever, took the lead in conversations with strangers. She
wondered if it had anything to do with the intricate-looking blueprint on the desk. Henry was looking at it as yearningly as if it were food. “We’re his cousins, you know.”

“We do appreciate you taking this time to talk to us, Mr. Mortmain,” Charlotte added hastily. “We know he was only an employee of yours, one of dozens—”

“Hundreds,” said Mr. Mortmain. He had a pleasant baritone voice, which at the moment sounded very amused. “It is true I can’t keep track of them all. But I do remember Mr. Gray. Though I must say, if he ever mentioned that he had cousins who were Shadowhunters, I can’t say I recall it.”

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?

—Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”

“You know,” said Jem, “this isn’t at all what I thought a brothel would look like.”

The two boys stood at the entrance to what Tessa called the Dark House, off Whitechapel High Street. It looked dingier and darker than Will remembered, as if someone had swabbed it with a coating of extra dirt. “What were you imagining exactly, James? Ladies of the night waving from the balconies? Nude statues adorning the entranceway?”

“I suppose,” Jem said mildly, “I was expecting something that looked a bit less drab.”

Will had thought rather the same thing the first time he had been there. The overwhelming sensation one had inside the Dark House was that it was a place no one had ever really thought of as a home. The latched windows looked greasy, the drawn curtains dingy and unwashed.

Will rolled up his sleeves. “We’ll probably have to knock down the door—”

“Or,” said Jem, reaching out and giving the knob a twist, “not.”

The door swung open onto a rectangle of darkness.

“Now, that’s simply laziness,” said Will. Taking a hunting dagger from his belt, he stepped cautiously inside, and Jem followed, keeping tight hold of his jade-headed walking stick. They tended to take turns going first into dangerous situations, though Jem preferred to be rear guard much of the time—Will always forgot to look behind him.

The door swung shut behind them, prisoning them in the half-lit gloom. The entryway looked almost the same as it had the first time Will had been there—the same wooden staircase leading up, the same cracked but still elegant marble flooring, the same air thick with dust.

Jem raised his hand, and his witchlight flared into life, frightening a group of blackbeetles. They scurried across the floor, causing Will to grimace. “Nice place to live, isn’t it? Let’s hope they left something behind other than filth. Forwarding addresses, a few severed limbs, a prostitute or two …”

“Indeed. Perhaps, if we’re fortunate, we can still catch syphilis.”

“Or demon pox,” Will suggested cheerfully, trying the door under the stairs. It swung open, unlocked as the front door had been. “There’s always demon pox.”

“Demon pox does not exist.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” said Will, disappearing into the darkness under the stairs.

Together they searched the cellar and the ground-floor rooms meticulously, finding little but rubbish and dust. Everything had been stripped from the room where Tessa and Will had fought off the Dark Sisters; after a long search Will discovered something on the wall that looked like a smear of blood, but there seemed no source for it, and Jem pointed out it could just as well be paint.

Abandoning the cellar, they moved upstairs, and found a long corridor lined with doors that was familiar to Will. He had raced down it with Tessa behind him. He ducked into the first room on the right, which had been the room he’d found her in. No sign lingered of the wild-eyed girl who’d hit him with a flowered pitcher. The room was empty, the furniture having been taken away to be searched inside the Silent City. Four dark indentations on the floor indicated where a bed had once stood.

The other rooms were much the same. Will was trying the window in one when he heard Jem shout that he should come quickly; he was in the last room on the left. Will made haste and found Jem standing in the center of a large square room, his witchlight shining in his hand. He was not alone. There was one piece of furniture remaining here—an upholstered armchair, and seated in it was a woman.

She was young—probably no older than Jessamine—and wore a cheap-looking printed dress, her hair gathered up at the nape of her neck. It was dull-brown mousy hair, and her hands were bare and red. Her eyes were wide open and staring.

“Gah,” said Will, too surprised to say anything else. “Is she—”

“She’s dead,” said Jem.

“Are you certain?” Will could not take his eyes off the woman’s face. She was pale, but not with a corpse’s pallor, and her hands lay folded in her lap, the fingers softly curved, not stiff with the rigor of death. He moved closer to her and placed a hand on her arm. It was rigid and cold beneath his fingers. “Well, she’s not responding to my advances,” he observed more brightly than he felt, “so she
must
be dead.”

“Or she’s a woman of good taste and sense.” Jem knelt down and looked up into the woman’s face. Her eyes were pale blue and protuberant; they stared past him, as dead-looking as painted eyes. “Miss,” he said, and reached for her wrist, meaning to take a pulse.

She moved, jerking under his hand, and let out a low inhuman moan.

Jem stood up hastily. “What in—”

The woman raised her head. Her eyes were still blank, unfocused, but her lips moved with a grinding sound. “Beware!” she cried. Her voice echoed around the room, and Will, with a yell, jumped back.

The woman’s voice sounded like gears grating against one another. “Beware, Nephilim. As you slay others, so shall you be slain. Your angel cannot protect you against that which neither God nor the devil has made, an army born neither of Heaven nor Hell. Beware the hand of man. Beware.” Her voice rose to a high, grinding shriek, and she jerked back and forth in the chair like a puppet being yanked on invisible strings. “BEWARE BEWAREBEWAREBEWARE—”

“Good God,” muttered Jem.

“BEWARE!” the woman shrieked one last time, and toppled
forward to sprawl on the ground, abruptly silenced. Will stared, openmouthed.

“Is she … ?” he began.

“Yes,” Jem said. “I think she’s
quite
dead this time.”

But Will was shaking his head. “Dead. You know, I don’t
think
so.”

“What do you think, then?”

Instead of answering, Will went and knelt down by the body. He put two fingers to the side of the woman’s cheek and turned her head gently until she faced them. Her mouth was wide, her right eye staring at the ceiling. The left dangled halfway down her cheek, attached to its socket by a coil of copper wire.

“She’s not alive,” said Will, “but not dead, either. She may be … like one of Henry’s gadgets, I think.” He touched her face. “Who could have done this?”

“I can hardly guess. But she called us Nephilim. She knew what we are.”

“Or someone did,” said Will. “I don’t imagine she
knows
anything. I think she’s a machine, like a clock. And she has run down.” He stood up. “Regardless, we had best get her back to the Institute. Henry will want to have a look at her.”

Jem did not reply; he was looking down at the woman on the floor. Her feet were bare beneath the hem of her dress, and dirty. Her mouth was open and he could see the gleam of metal inside her throat. Her eye dangled eerily on its bit of copper wire as somewhere outside the windows a church clock chimed the midday hour.

Once inside the park, Tessa found herself beginning to relax. She hadn’t been in a green, quiet place since she’d come to
London, and she found herself almost reluctantly delighted by the sight of grass and trees, though she thought the park nowhere near as fine as Central Park in New York. The air was not as hazy here as it was over the rest of the city, and the sky overhead had achieved a color that was almost blue.

Thomas waited with the carriage while the girls made their promenade. As Tessa walked beside Jessamine, the other girl kept up a constant stream of chatter. They were making their way down a broad thoroughfare that, Jessamine informed her, was inexplicably called Rotten Row. Despite the inauspicious name, it was apparently
the
place to see and be seen. Down the center of it paraded men and women on horseback, exquisitely attired, the women with their veils flying, their laughter echoing in the summer air. Along the sides of the avenue walked other pedestrians. Chairs and benches were set up under the trees, and women sat twirling colorful parasols and sipping peppermint water; beside them bewhiskered gentlemen smoked, filling the air with the smell of tobacco mixed with cut grass and horses.

Though no one stopped to talk to them, Jessamine seemed to know who everyone was—who was getting married, who was seeking a husband, who was having an affair with so-and-so’s wife and everyone knew all about it. It was a bit dizzying, and Tessa was glad when they stepped off the row and onto a narrower path leading into the park.

Jessamine slid her arm through Tessa’s and gave her hand a companionable squeeze. “You don’t know what a relief it is to finally have another girl around,” she said cheerfully. “I mean, Charlotte’s all right, but she’s boring and married.”

“There’s Sophie.”

Jessamine snorted. “Sophie’s a servant.”

“I’ve known girls who were quite companionable with their ladies’ maids,” Tessa protested. This was not precisely true. She had read about such girls, though she had never known one. Still, according to novels, the main function of a ladies’ maid was to listen to you as you poured your heart out about your tragic love life, and occasionally to dress in your clothes and pretend to be you so you could avoid being captured by a villain. Not that Tessa could picture Sophie participating in anything like that on Jessamine’s behalf.

“
You’ve
seen what her face looks like. Being hideous has made her bitter. A ladies’ maid is meant to be pretty, and speak French, and Sophie can’t manage either. I told Charlotte as much when she brought the girl home. Charlotte didn’t listen to me. She never does.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Tessa. They had turned onto a narrow path that wound between trees. The glint of the river was visible through them, and the branches above knotted together into a canopy, blocking the brightness of the sun.

“I know! Neither can I!” Jessamine raised her face, letting what sun broke through the canopy dance across her skin. “Charlotte never listens to anyone. She’s always henpecking poor Henry. I don’t know why he married her at all.”

“I assume because he loved her?”

Jessamine snorted. “No one thinks that. Henry wanted access to the Institute so he could work on his little experiments in the cellar and not have to fight. And I don’t think he
minded
marrying Charlotte—I don’t think there was anyone else he wanted to marry—but if someone else had been running the Institute, he would have married them instead.” She sniffed.
“And then there’s the boys—Will and Jem. Jem’s pleasant enough, but you know how foreigners are. Not really trustworthy and basically selfish and lazy. He’s always in his room, pretending to be ill, refusing to do anything to help out,” Jessamine went on blithely, apparently forgetting the fact that Jem and Will were off searching the Dark House right now, while she promenaded in the park with Tessa. “And
Will.
Handsome enough, but behaves like a lunatic half the time; it’s as if he were brought up by savages. He has no respect for anyone or anything, no concept of the way a gentleman is supposed to behave. I suppose it’s because he’s Welsh.”

Tessa was baffled. “Welsh?”
Is that a bad thing to be?
she was about to add, but Jessamine, thinking that Tessa was doubting Will’s origins, went on with relish.

“Oh, yes. With that black hair of his, you can absolutely tell. His mother was a Welshwoman. His father fell in love with her, and that was that. He left the Nephilim. Maybe she cast a spell on him.” Jessamine laughed. “They have all kinds of odd magic and things in Wales, you know.”

Tessa did not know. “Do you know what happened to Will’s parents? Are they dead?”

“I suppose they must be, mustn’t they, or they would have come looking for him?” Jessamine furrowed her brow. “Ugh. Anyway. I don’t want to talk about the Institute anymore.” She swung around to look at Tessa. “You must be wondering why I’ve been being so nice to you.”

“Er …” Tessa had been wondering, rather. In novels girls like herself, girls whose families had once had money but who had fallen on hard times, were often taken in by kindly wealthy
protectors and were furnished with new clothes and a good education. (Not, Tessa thought, that there had been anything wrong with her education. Aunt Harriet had been as learned as any governess.) Of course, Jessamine did not in any way resemble the saintly older ladies of such tales, whose acts of generosity were totally selfless. “Jessamine, have you ever read
The Lamplighter
?”

“Certainly not. Girls shouldn’t read novels,” said Jessamine, in the tone of someone reciting something she’d heard somewhere else. “Regardless, Miss Gray, I have a proposition to put to you.”

“Tessa,” Tessa corrected automatically.