“Oh, very well, thank you,” Cordelia said, then realized that if her mother really were in peak condition, she had little excuse for staying away from James and the Institute. “Well, she has been very tired, and of course we are all concerned that she get her energy back. Risa has been trying to build her back up again with many… soups.”
Soups? Cordelia was not at all sure why she’d said that. Perhaps because her mother had always told her that ash-e jo, a sour barley soup, could cure anything.
“Soups?”
“Soups,” Cordelia said firmly. “Risa’s caretaking is very thorough, though of course, my mother wishes me by her side as much as possible. I have been reading to her—”
“Oh, anything interesting? I’m always seeking a new book,” said Will, having finished with the cuff links. They were studded with yellow topaz. The color of James’s eyes.
“Ah—no,” Cordelia said. “Only very boring things, really. Books about… ornithology.” Will’s eyebrows went up, but James had already thrown himself into the fray.
“I really must get Cordelia back home,” he said, laying a hand on her back. It was an entirely ordinary husbandly gesture, not at all remarkable. It felt to Cordelia like being struck by lightning between her shoulder blades. “I’ll see you in a moment, Father.”
“Well, Cordelia, we all hope you’ll be back before too long,” Will said. “James is positively pining away without you here. Incomplete without his better half, eh, James?” He went away up the stairs and down the corridor, whistling.
“Well,” said James after a long silence. “I thought, when I was ten years old and my father showed everyone the drawings I’d made of myself as Jonathan Shadowhunter, slaying a dragon, that was the most my parents would ever humiliate me. But that is no longer the case. There is a new champion.”
“Your father is something of a romantic, that’s all.”
“So you’ve noticed?” James still had his hand on her back, and Cordelia did not have the willpower to ask him to remove it. She let him guide her downstairs, where she fetched her coat in the entryway while James went to ask Davies, one of the Institute’s footmen, to bring the carriage around.
She joined him on the front step. He had not put on a jacket, and the icy wind stirred the locks of his dark hair where they kissed his cheeks and the back of his neck. When he saw her come outside, he exhaled—a plume of white—and reached into his pocket.
To Cordelia’s surprise, he drew out a pair of gloves. Her gloves. Pale gray kidskin with a tracery of leaves, though they were now very crumpled, and even a bit spotted, as if drops of rain had fallen on them.
“You left these,” James said, his voice very calm, “when you went to Paris. I wanted to return them to you. My apologies—I’ve been carrying them around all this time and meant to give them to you earlier.”
Cordelia took the gloves from him, puzzled. “But—why have you been carrying them around?”
He ran his hands through his hair, a characteristic gesture. “I want to be honest with you,” he said. “Very honest, because I think it is the only hope we have to come out of this. And I do still hope, Daisy. I will not bother you about it—about you and me—but I will not give up on us either.”
She looked at him in surprise. For all he had joked on the stairway about being humiliated, there was only a quiet determination in his face, his eyes. Even a sort of steely pride. He was not ashamed of anything he felt, that much was clear.
“I went after you that night,” he said. “The night you left. I followed you to Matthew’s, and then to the train station. I was on the platform—I saw you board the train. I would have gone after you, but my father had Tracked me to Waterloo. Lucie had disappeared, and I had to go after her.”
She looked down at the gloves in her hand. “You were there? On the train station platform?”
“Yes,” James said. He reached out and folded her hand over the gloves. His own was reddened with cold, his fingernails bitten down to the quick. “I wanted you to know. I went after you the moment I knew you’d left. I didn’t wait until hurt pride settled in or anything like that. I realized you were leaving and I ran after you, because when someone you love is leaving, all you think about is getting them back.”
Someone you love. His face was inches from hers. She thought, I could raise myself up on my toes and kiss him. He would kiss me back. I could put down the dreadful weight I’ve been carrying, this weight of caution that says: Be careful. You could be hurt again.
But the image of Matthew flashed across her field of vision then. Matthew and the lights of Paris, and all the reasons she had run away in the first place. She heard the creak of the wheels of the carriage as it rolled into the courtyard, and like Cinderella’s midnight clock, the spell was broken.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the gloves.”
She turned to descend the steps; she didn’t look back to see if James watched her depart.
As the carriage rumbled away from the Institute and into the purple-and-gray London dusk, she thought, If James saw me get on that train, he can’t have spent more than an hour with Grace, and probably less. And then—he fled from her? But what could possibly have caused his feelings to change so suddenly as that?
Would anything ever feel familiar again? James was not sure. Here he sat, eating supper with his family in the dining room where he’d eaten thousands of meals before, and yet the experiences of the past weeks had made everything strange. Here was the china cabinet with the glass-paneled doors and delicate inlaid floral marquetry; he remembered his mother ordering it from Shoolbred’s to replace the hideous Victorian monstrosity that had been there before. Here were the slim and elegant dining chairs with their backs carved in the shape of ferns that Lucie, when younger, had liked to pretend were warring pirate ships, and the pale green wallpaper, and the white glass lily-shaped lamps on either side of the fluted porcelain vase on the mantel that Tessa kept filled with fresh flowers every week, even in winter.
None of this had changed. But James had. He had left, after all; he had gotten married, moved into his own house. Very soon he would reach the age of majority, and the Clave would acknowledge him as an adult. But now he felt as though circumstance had forced him back into ill-fitting children’s clothes, a costume he had long outgrown.
“And what do you think, James?” said his mother.
James looked up, feeling guilty. He hadn’t been paying any attention. “Sorry, what was that?”
Lucie said, “We were talking about the Christmas party. It’s only three days away.” She gave James a beady look, as if to say, I know perfectly well you weren’t paying attention, and weren’t we just talking about this earlier?