“I really am—awfully sorry,” she said breathlessly, and fled. She had barely made it to her own bedroom when she heard the click of his door as it shut, and locked, behind her.
LONDON: 48 CURZON STREET
Huddled in the lee of a wall, he had watched them go in—James Herondale and his red-haired bride, the bearer of Cortana. They had climbed down from their carriage in Shadowhunter gold and splendor, both of them glimmering like precious trinkets in the fading light of the winter sun.
It was nearly dark now. Yellow light sprang into life at one upper window, then another. He knew he could not wait here much longer; he was risking frostbite, or some other sort of damage. Human bodies were cruelly frail. Trinkets indeed, he thought, huddling deeper within his coat. When the time was right, they would come apart so easily in his hands—like shiny, worthless baubles. Like broken child’s toys.
6 THINGS TO COME
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
—John Keats, Letters
James never mentioned the episode with the wedding dress, much to Cordelia’s relief. Other than making sure Risa would always be around to assist her when she dressed, Cordelia was very content to go on as if nothing had happened.
She found it easier than she would have guessed. On the day of her wedding, she had been certain a year of horrible awkwardness lay before her. But to her surprise, as the next two weeks passed, the question of awkwardness never seemed to come into it. She was not reminded of Grace; in fact, she found herself forgetting, sometimes for hours at a time, that James’s sentiments were engaged elsewhere. Being with other people was easy, even enjoyable—she and James went out, had suppers with friends and at the Institute, though they had not yet been invited to Cornwall Gardens. Magnus had not yet visited—from Anna, they learned that he and Jem had encountered problems with the books at the Cornwall Institute, and had brought them to the Spiral Labyrinth for further investigation. It was not yet certain when they’d return.
However, the Merry Thieves came over to carouse and to eat Risa’s cooking nearly every day. Will, Tessa, and Lucie visited frequently. Anna stopped by in the evenings, once ending up in a four-hour conversation with James about draperies, during which Cordelia fell asleep on the divan.
Being alone with James, Cordelia discovered to her surprise, was just as easy.
It did not happen all at once, of course. They relaxed into it: often reading together, in opposite chairs by the fire in the drawing room. Other nights, they ate dinner in the study and played games: draughts, chess, backgammon. Cordelia couldn’t play cards and James offered to teach her, but she demurred; she preferred the physicality of the board games, the way they played out like a battle, in real space.
Each night, after the game was won, the winner would ask a question. It was how Cordelia discovered that James didn’t like parsnips, that he sometimes wished he were taller （though, as she reminded him, he was a very respectable six feet）， that he’d always wanted to see Constantinople. And how she told James that she was afraid of snakes even though she knew it was silly, and that she wished she could play the cello, and that she thought her best feature was her hair. （James had only smiled at this, and when she tried to make him tell her what he was thinking of, he waved it away.） The teasing and laughter after was often the best part; Cordelia had loved James as a friend before she’d ever loved him another way, and this was when she was reminded why.
She liked the way conversation would fade and slow as they both became sleepier, but neither wanted to stop talking about anything and everything. She talked about traveling the world, and what she had seen: chained Barbary apes in Marrakech, the lemon trees of Menton, the Bay of Naples after a storm, a procession of elephants at the Red Fort in Delhi. James spoke longingly of travel: how as a boy he had kept a map on his wall with pins stuck into the places he hoped to one day go. Since neither had ever been to Constantinople, they spent a night pulling books and maps off the shelves, reading accounts of travels to the city aloud, discussing the sights they’d want to see—the minarets of mosques illuminated at night, St. Sophia, the ancient port, the city divided by its river. James lay on the rug with his arms crossed behind his head as Cordelia read aloud from an old travel memoir: “The Queen of Cities was before me, throned on her peopled hills, with the silver Bosphorus, garlanded with palaces, flowing at her feet.”
He chuckled, only a sliver of gold visible beneath his half-closed eyelids. “You’re better than a Baedeker,” he said. “Go on, then.”