“We were concerned since you and Charles are both now quite grown up,” said Henry. “Gideon, good fellow, has been dancing attendance on Charlotte during Clave meetings. He has always stood your mother’s friend, lending her the Lightwood name and consequence whenever she needed support, and advising her when she wished for good counsel. I am afraid I have never truly understood the workings of an Institute, let alone the Clave. Your mama is a wonder.”
Gideon had been helping his mother. Matthew was the one who had attacked her.
“I had thought we might name her Matilda,” Father said in a slow, sad voice. “I had a Great-Aunt Matilda. She was very old when I was still a young rip, and the other boys used to tease me. She would give me books and tell me that I was smarter than any of them. She had splendid buttery-white wavy hair, but it was gold when she was a girl. When you were born, you already had the dearest fair lovelocks. I called her Aunt Matty. I never told you, because I thought you might not like to be named for a lady. You already have a great deal to endure with your foolish father, and those who cavil at your mother and your parabatai. You bear it all so gracefully.”
Matthew’s father touched his hair with a gentle, loving hand. Matthew wished he would pick up a blade and cut Matthew’s throat.
“I wish you could have known your great-great aunt. She was very like you. She was the sweetest woman God ever made,” said Father. “Save your mother.”
Brother Zachariah glided in then, a shadow amid all the other shadows crowding that room, to summon Matthew’s father to his mother’s bedside.
Matthew was left alone.
He stared in the gathering darkness at his mother’s overturned chair, the dropped scone and its trail of crumbs going nowhere, the greasy remnants of breakfast over the disarranged table. He, Matthew, was always dragging his friends and family to art galleries, always anxious to dance through life, always prattling of truth and beauty like a fool. He had run headlong into a Shadow Market and blithely trusted a Downworlder, because Downworlders seemed exciting, because she had called Shadowhunters brutal and Matthew had agreed, believing he knew better than they. It was not the faerie woman’s fault, or Alastair’s, or the fault of any other soul. He was the one who had chosen to distrust his mother. He had fed his mother poison with his own hands. He was not a fool. He was a villain.
Matthew bowed the fair head that had been passed to him through his father, from his father’s best-loved relative. He sat in that dark room and wept.
Brother Zachariah descended the stairs after a long battle with death, to tell Matthew Fairchild that his mother would live.
James and Lucie had come with Tessa and waited in the hall all this long day. Lucie’s hands were chilled when she clung to him.
She asked: “Aunt Charlotte, is she safe?”
Yes, my darlings, said Jem. Yes.
“Thank the Angel,” breathed James. “Matthew’s heart would break. All our hearts would.”
Brother Zachariah was not so sure of Matthew’s heart, after the mischief Matthew had wrought, but he wanted to offer James and Lucie what comfort he could.
Go to the library. There is a fire lit. I will send Matthew to you.
When he went into the breakfast room, he found Matthew, who had been all gold and laughter, cowering in his chair as if he could not bear what was to come.
“My mother,” he whispered at once, his voice brittle and dry as old bones.
She will live, said Jem, and softened seeing the boy’s pain.
James had known his parabatai’s heart better than Jem. There had been a time when Will was a boy everybody assumed the worst of, with good reason, except for Jem. He did not want to learn harsh judgment from the Silent Brothers, or a less forgiving heart.
Matthew lifted his head to face Brother Zachariah. His eyes told of agony, but he held his voice steady.
“And the child?”
Brother Zachariah said, The child did not live.
Matthew’s hands closed on the edge of his chair. His knuckles were white. He looked older than he had a mere two nights ago.
Matthew, said Brother Zachariah, and walled off his brothers in his head as well as he might.
“Yes?”
Rely upon a Silent Brother for silence, said Jem. I will not tell anybody about the Shadow Market, or any bargains you may have made there.
Matthew swallowed. Jem thought he might be about to be thanked, but Jem had not done this for thanks.
I will not tell anybody, he said, But you should. A secret too long kept can kill a soul by inches. I watched a secret almost destroy a man once, the finest man ever made. Such a secret is like keeping treasure in a tomb. Little by little, poison eats away at the gold. By the time the door is opened, there may be nothing left but dust.
Brother Zachariah stared into the young face that had been so bright. He waited and hoped to see that face lit again.
“All this about the Shadow Market,” Matthew faltered.
Yes? said Jem.
The boy flung back his golden head.
“I’m sorry,” said Matthew coldly. “I do not know what you are talking about.”
Zachariah’s heart fell.
So be it, he said. James and Lucie are waiting for you in the library. Let them give you whatever comfort they can.
Matthew stood from his chair, moving as if he had grown suddenly old over the course of a day. Sometimes the distance Silent Brothers possessed moved them to dispassionate observation, and too far from pity.
It would be a long time, Brother Zachariah knew, before there could be any comfort for Matthew Fairchild.
The library in Matthew’s house was a far smaller and less loved and lived-in room than the library in the London Institute, but tonight there was a fire burning and Herondales waiting within. Matthew stumbled into the room as if he were walking in from midwinter cold, his limbs too chilled to move.
As one, as if they had only been waiting for his coming, James and Lucie looked up at him. They were pressed together on a sofa at the hearth. By firelight, Lucie’s eyes were as eerie as James’s, her eyes a paler and more fiercely burning blue than her father’s. It was as though James’s gold was the corona of a flame and Lucie’s blue its burning heart.
They were a strange pair, these two Herondales, thorned mysterious plants in the hothouse of the Nephilim. Matthew could not have loved either of them more dearly.
Lucie leaped to her feet and ran to him with her hands outstretched. Matthew shuddered away. He realized, with dull pain, that he did not feel worthy of being touched by her.
Lucie glanced at him sharply, then nodded. She always saw a lot, their Luce.
“I will leave you two together,” she said decisively. “Take as long as ever you may.”
She reached out her hand to touch his, and Matthew shrank away from her again. This time he saw that it hurt, but Lucie only murmured his name and withdrew.
He could not tell Lucie this, and see her disgust of him, but he and James were bound. Perhaps James would try to understand.
Matthew advanced, every step a terrible effort, toward the fire. Once he was near enough, James reached out and clasped Matthew’s wrist, drawing Matthew close to the sofa. He laid Matthew’s hand over James’s heart, and covered it with his own. Matthew looked down into James’s fire-gold eyes.
“Mathew,” said Jamie, pronouncing his name in the Welsh way and with the Welsh lilt that let Matthew know he meant it as an endearment. “I am so sorry. What can I do?”
He felt he could not live on with this massive stone of a secret crushing his chest. If he was ever going to tell anyone, he should tell his parabatai.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I was talking about Alastair Carstairs yesterday. What I meant to tell you was that he insulted my mother. He said—”
“I understand,” said James. “You do not have to tell me.”
Matthew drew in a small shaky breath. He wondered if James really could understand.
“I know the kind of thing they say about Aunt Charlotte,” said James with quiet fierceness. “They say similar things about my mother. You remember that man Augustus Pounceby, last year? He waited until we were alone to cast slurs upon my mother’s good name.” A small grim smile curved James’s mouth. “So I threw him in the river.”