It seemed that hardly any time had passed at all when Tatiana reappeared, rubbing her hands together with excitement. Grace rose, wary. “One of my patrons,” Tatiana said as she went around the desk, “has found a solution to your problem.”
“Your patrons?” Grace said.
“Yes,” said Tatiana, “a solution that will grant us even greater power over Herondale than you could wield over anyone else.”
From her pocket she produced a bracelet, a band of sleek silver. For a moment, it reflected a glare of candlelight into Grace’s eyes. Tatiana went on to explain her plan, the story she had crafted. Grace was to tell James the bracelet was an old heirloom of her birth parents, Tatiana said, and Grace felt a pang so deep within herself that, she was sure, no part of it was expressed on her face at all. Tatiana would hide the bracelet in a box in her study; next, Grace was to trick James into recovering the bracelet for her. “The moment he lays his willing hand upon it,” her mother was saying, “he will be lost, for it is so powerful that even to touch it is to be overcome by its magic.”
“Why make him retrieve the bracelet himself from the house?” Grace said, puzzled. “I’m sure he would simply accept it if I offered it to him as a gift.”
Tatiana smiled. “Grace, you must trust me. The adventure of getting the thing will stick the bracelet in his mind. He will care about it—because he loves you, of course, but also because of the story it carries in his mind.”
Grace knew there was no point resisting. There was never any point resisting. Her mother was all she had; there was nowhere else she could go. Even if she confessed everything to James, threw herself on the mercy of his infamously brutish parents, she would lose everything. Her home, her name, her brother. And her mother’s wrath would burn her to nothing.
And there was another factor motivating her as well. All year, Tatiana had been dropping hints that this plan to enchant James Herondale was in some manner part of the plan to restore Jesse. She would not say so outright, but Grace was not so stupid that she could not put two and two together. Perhaps there were limits to what she would willingly do for the sake of her mother. But to have Jesse back in a physical form, alive and safe, would change Grace’s life immeasurably. She would do whatever was necessary to save him, so that he might save her.
21 HELL’S OWN TRACK
“Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest:
This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.”
“Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting:
This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
—Christina Gabriel Rossetti, “Amor Mundi”
Grace was weary of winter, weary of stepping into slush puddles that stained her kid boots, weary of the cold that seeped into her thin frame when she went out, finding its way under her skirts and into the fingers of her gloves and to the very core of her, until it seemed she’d never feel warm again.
She had lived through many other winters, huddled inside Blackthorn Manor. But this winter she’d spent most of her nights sneaking out. She’d return to the Bridgestocks’ chilled to the bone, only to find the bedcovers ice-cold, the warmth long gone from the ceramic hot-water bottle at the foot of the bed.
Tonight, though, Grace would much rather have been in her small room at the Bridgestocks’， perhaps visiting with Jesse, than where she was—working up the courage to break into the Consul’s house as a chill winter wind sliced through her coat, and night owls hooted in the branches of the trees in the square.
She’d have thought everyone would be asleep at this hour, but annoyingly, light still glowed from the well windows below street level. Maybe Henry Fairchild had left them on by accident? He was certainly absentminded enough for that to be a possibility. Unless she wanted to freeze to death, she would just have to take her chances.
She slunk along the side of the building toward the stairs down to the furnace room, which connected to the lab via a narrow, dank passage that hardly anyone ever used. She had brought the master key to the house that she’d filched from Charles long ago. She was just glad he was still in France, in no position to find out what she was up to.
She slipped inside and crept along in the dark, following the weak light that spilled into the narrow passageway up ahead. The laboratory door had been cracked open slightly; she peered through the gap and saw the room empty, Henry’s work area as untidy as usual.
She stepped inside—and jumped. There was Christopher Lightwood, perched in the corner on a wooden stool, turning a peculiar object over in his hand. What is he doing hiding in a corner? she thought furiously. Couldn’t he sit at the table like a normal person, where she could have spied on him properly?