“Was it a proper party, then?”
“Certainly not! There’s nothing wholly proper about any event hosted by Anna Lightwood. But that’s what makes her parties so good.”
“I’ve never been to a party,” Jesse said. “I would have loved to have attended one of hers.”
“You were at the ball when you first came to London,” Lucie reminded him.
“True. But I couldn’t dance, couldn’t taste the food or the wine.” He cocked his head to the side. “You’re the writer,” he said. “Describe the party to me.”
“Describe it?” They had turned onto St. Bride’s Lane. The neighborhood was smaller, cozier; the snow gave the cobbled streets a fairy-tale feel. Icicles hung from the corners of half-timbered houses, and through leaded glass windowpanes glowing fires could be seen. Lucie put her chin in the air. “I will take your challenge, Jesse Blackthorn. I shall describe tonight’s party to you in such detail, you will feel as though you had been there.”
She launched into a description, painting the scene as if she were writing in her novel. She embroidered on conversations, making them funnier than they had been; she described the taste of everything on offer from the flakiness of the pastries to the fizziness of the punch. She wove a picture of the outrageous polka-dotted cravat Matthew had paired with striped silk trousers and a magenta vest. She remembered that Jesse hadn’t met Filomena, and she told him all about the young Italian girl and her vampiric admirer.
“She’s a very good dancer,” said Lucie. “She taught us a new waltz that she learned in Peru.”
The gates of the Institute rose before them, its spire piercing the clouds overhead. Lucie paused at the gates, turning to Jesse. “Thank you for walking me home. However, I did not hear the apology I was promised. You should not have read my book without asking.”
He leaned against the gatepost. Or at least, he seemed to: Lucie knew that he was insubstantial, and the gatepost solid. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”
There was something about him, she thought; he was the opposite of Matthew, in his way. Matthew put a bright face on every situation, even if it was dreadful. While Jesse spoke directly, never deflecting.
“And you should not have said I thought of you as a joke, or of your situation that way,” she said. “All I want is to help you. To repair this.”
“To repair death?” he said softly. “Lucie. You were wrong in what you said—but only when you claimed you are not like Princess Lucinda. Not brave or resourceful or clever. You are a thousand times those things. You are better than any imagined heroine. You are my heroine.”
Lucie felt herself blush. “Then why—”
“Did I get so angry? It must have seemed to you that I hated the book,” he said, his voice low and rapid, as if he wished to get to the end of what he had to say before his nerve failed him. “Or hated your writing, or hated that character—Jethro—but it was nothing of the sort. If anything, I was jealous of the bastard. His one purpose is to say exactly what he feels.” He looked up at the sky, the snow. “You have to understand that I always, always assumed that you could never feel anything for me. And that is why I thought that it was safe that I felt the way I did about you.”
Lucie stood motionless. She couldn’t have moved had a charging Shax demon suddenly appeared. “What do you mean?” she whispered. “What do you mean, the way you felt?”
He pushed himself away from the wall. He was truly agitated now, she realized, so much so that when he gestured, the movement of his hands seemed to shimmer in the air. It was something she had seen before, when ghosts became desperately upset—not that she wanted to think of Jesse as an ordinary sort of ghost like Jessamine, or Old Mol. “It’s almost a joke,” he said, and the bitterness in his voice surprised her. “A ghost falling in love with a living girl and pining away in a dusty attic while she lives her life. But I could survive that, Lucie. It would just be a tragedy for me.”
A ghost falling in love.
A small flame lit in Lucie’s chest. An ember, the beginning of a blaze. “It’s never a tragedy to love somebody.”
“I think Romeo and Juliet would disagree with you on that.” His voice shook. “And don’t you see? If—if you loved me back, then that is not just a tragedy for one of us; it’s a tragedy for both of us. For there can be no future in it.”