To the Blackthorn Nephilim residing at Blackthorn Manor, Chiswick
FromHypatia Vex, Fellow, Spiral Labyrinth
My greetings. Attached please find the first pages of Tatiana Blackthorn’s diary that I have translated from Purgatic. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought that Magnus Bane might shed some light on the situation that caused you to bring the diary to me, and he did, speaking of a curse upon the house. I have skipped over a number of entries related to the author’s clothes, opinions about her peers, complaints about the weather, and so on, in favor of one that I think will be of special interest (though it rather contradicts what I think of as the history of the house — Benedict Lightwood of course was hardly known to be trustworthy, or perhaps things have altered since his time. A mystery to be delved into, perhaps?)
I will be in touch soon with further translation.
Yours,
H. Vex
Dear Diary, tonight I am in a state of rare elation. It seems that my patience and care may not be as worthless as they are usually assumed to be by the members of this family. For I believe that Father has at long last come to accept and even approve of my betrothal to Rupert! (Oh, happy day, oh darlingRupert!) More astonishing, he has communicated this not by anything so clumsy as an awkward sentimental statement, but instead by taking me into his confidence, and telling me of things that I am sure he has never shared with my brothers.
It was after supper. The Terrible Gs were off whacking at each other with swords, or some such nonsense. Father usually repairs to his study, of course, but tonight he came over to me and, out of the blue, asked me to accompany him there. I dutifully followed.
There he closed the door with care and bade me sit in one of the wing-chairs facing his desk. He settled himself in his own chair and began by telling me that the Lightwood name is a powerful and ancient one.
I replied that I knew that and, indeed, never forgot it.
He continued to say that such a name brings with it great prestige and influence, but also great enmity. The adversaries of the Lightwoods were many, he said. “And I speak not of the demons we make war on, or even of the half-demons permitted to roam the earth on our sufferance, but of those of our own race, that is, the Nephilim.” He explained that there was great envy towards us, and while it would not be expressed directly, there were those who would seek to destroy us.
I asked him who he was thinking of in particular, but he demurred. The enemies change, he said, with the times; alliances form and crumble, as the varying Shadowhunter families’ interests are altered by time and fate.
(I am recording his words as exactly as I can recall them, Diary. I admire the forceful manner by which he expresses himself, and wish to take it upon myself, since the others in my family do not.)
He went on to explain that while it is not widely known, we are well-protected here in Lightwood House, not only by the sound brick and stone, but by an enchantment that affects the house and its grounds themselves.
An enchantment! I was astonished. I knew that magic was a subject of interest to Father, and that his researches led him to minor experimentations. I had no idea that he had accomplished so much. This I expressed in, I hope, a complimentary manner. He said that it had taken him several years to make the preparations, for he did not trust anyone, even a warlock paid well for their silence, with the knowledge of the house’s protection.
The enchantment is very elaborate, as I understand, and its effects somewhat difficult to communicate. Father said that it served both to prevent other Nephilim from investigating the house, and to keep areas of the house, and possessions of the family, hidden from discovery. I asked by what means did the enchantment work, and he said that it had to do with ley-lines, the seams of magic that cross the earth, and a half-dozen objects selected and placed at locations along those ley-lines that are a matter of elaborate calculation.
I pressed him for more detail, reminding him that I shared his interest in the topic of magic, but that was all he would tell. He explained that I was as yet an unmarried girl who need not trouble herself with the ways of the world—and here I finally reach the reason for telling this story, Diary.
As he spoke of me, he gave me a look, one that at first I could not translate. But soon enough I realized: he said that I was “as yet” unmarried. By the glint in his eye I understand what he was saying: you will soon be a married woman.
And so all comes clear, in a beautiful burst of triumph!
Father accepts Rupert, and will approve our marriage—
This will cause me to gain my majority—
That will cause Father to take me further into his confidence about the nature of Lightwood House and his work in magic—
Becausehe understands that whatever the Law may say, I am the right and proper heir of his goals and his work—
And because he intends Rupert and I to become the masters of this Manor after him!
Though my efforts have been long and arduous, Diary, and I have feared they would never come to fruition, I sleep tonight with victory within my grasp, and only pity for my poor brothers, too vacuous and pigheaded to even understand what has happened while they beat each other with sticks in the training room.
Ah, it’s good to get back to the dank, gloomy ruin that is Cursed Blackthorn Hall. You know, I’ll almost miss the curse, when it’s gone. Just kidding! Cirenworth proves you can have an old manor house with hundreds of years of history and it can be warm and welcoming and friendly.
We got back yesterday night, and then this morning Hypatia came in with a few more translated bits of Tatiana’s diary. (Don’t worry, Bruce: you are my One True Diary. Tatiana’s diary means nothing to me, I swear, nothing!) She was a big weirdo about it as usual, of course; the translations are all on these large parchment pages that look like movie props but no, Hypatia just likes to use ancient yellowing vellums for her normal work here in the twenty-first century. Warlocks! She said something about treated pages, demon language, and so on. And she was wearing kind of a 40s burgundy dress with a matching hat and Bruce, the brim of this hat was so wide I thought the wind would carry her away. (Oh, I should have said, we were outside. Julian was on the roof with the builders, not my favorite thing, so I was watching from the front gates while I tried to cut back the briars, which grow here at like ten times the rate of anything in California despite the much worse weather. I pointed this out to one of the faeries and he looked at me and said, “Black. Thorn.” And then walked away as though he’d made a great point. But it was Lightwood House first, I yelled back, and he ignored me. Which is for the best, really.)
I’m pretty sure the briars had grown another few inches while we talked, but they would have to wait. I got Julian down from the roof and we went in to read.
It looks like Hypatia has started actually thinking about what she’s translating; instead of doing every entry, this time she had snippets from a bunch of entries put together (she dated each one). Which is a little bit of a shame because I kind of liked seeing Tatiana talk about her clothes or her brothers or whatever in between all the, you know, evil demon stuff. But I admit that evil demon stuff is what we are here for. Like the old Shadowhunter motto says, “Shadowhunters: That Evil Demon Stuff Is What We Are Here For.” But in Latin probably.
Some translated highlights for you, Bruce. I won’t include the dates, but they stretch over a matter of years. The first one is from 1878 and then most are in the 1880s, but then there’s a jump and the last one is from 1903. (Sometime before then she seems to have found a “patron” of some kind, but she doesn’t say who it is. Or why anybody would want to be the patron of such an unpleasant person…)
Father is dead and Rupert is dead. I cannot speak of what happened; when I try, the words will not come. It is the fault of the London Enclave, many of whom were present for their deaths. Not only did they not save either of the men I love most, I daresay they hastened the disaster. I shall be, at very least, registering a formal complaint with the Clave, but I have little hope of justice, of course. The corruption among the Nephilim here in London goes all the way to the roots.
I cannot believe I have been left all alone. My mother, gone. My brothers, gone. The walls of Lightwood House are my only companions, their silence a terrible reminder of how much I have lost, in such little time. Today I went from room to room, and wherever I found a mirror, I smashed it. The glass I left where it fell, a reminder that everything bright and good has been destroyed.
I have Rupert’s ring. It is all that remains of him. I know I must have felt happy, to stand beside him and recite the vows of marriage. I cannot dredge up the memory of that feeling. There is blood upon the ring. His blood. I shall never clean it.
To honor my father’s memory, I have begun going through the books in his library. Not the library the Clave knows about, of course, the one they pillaged after the incident involving his death, but the other one, Father’s sanctum, which the enchantment hides. I wish to learn what he knew. To seek power that will help me, who now has been left with nothing. I have found only one thing that causes my heart to beat in my chest: because of his violent end, far from his own home, it is not unlikely that the spirit of my Rupert may still be present here in the house. If he is here, I will find him. I will see him, and I will know that our love is more powerful than death.
I have searched and searched, performed spell after spell. I have not seen any ghost, not of Rupert, not of Father. Not even of some Lightwood relation long dead who might have been haunting the place earlier. Is it my father’s enchantment that keeps the dead from this place? Or does it only prevent my finding them? But I am the master of that enchantment now, as I am the true inheritor of the house. (If G and G attempt to take it from me, they will find there is more than an enchantment that will work against them.)
Father’s protection is fading. I can feel it, as I remain here in the house, and it becomes a part of me, as I become a part of it. Someday my son will inherit the house—the last gift that Rupert ever gave me—and I will not have Blackthorn Hall made unsafe for myself and my family. I have been reading extensively on the topic of the enchantment and I place the blame on the urn containing mother’s ashes, which fell from its location in the Lightwood tombs in the countryside and chipped terribly. It did not shatter, but since then I have felt the eyes of the world more upon me. But I believe that the objects themselves can be replaced, as long as the magic is renewed, and so instead of the urn the enchantment now inhabits Father’s mourning brooch, with its locks of Mother’s hair, and I have put it in the place of the urn. The spell has been rewoven and renewed. Father would be proud of me. He was right to make me the inheritor of all his works.
Rupert is here, I know it, though I cannot see him or hear him. Where else, indeed, could he be other than close to me, where he belonged, where he was meant to dwell before his life was cut so short by the machinations of the Enclave. Sometimes in the night I feel I can almost see him, as though he is hiding just behind a thin curtain that divides the living realm from the dead. And now I have made sure he will stay with me.
I realized that the objects of the protective enchantment on the house are things that would be important to Father, when he was master here. But now I am master here, and having studied more fully Father’s research, it was a simple matter to place his ring in a location of power. It will be part of the spell from here on, protecting the house as Rupert would have protected me.
You can see, Bruce, the way the last entry seems…different?
Vengeance. Vindication. They are close.
But the power of the house fades. At the worst time.
I appealed to my patron. He said the magic was of my own doing and that only I may repair it. But—for he is perceptive beyond any other—he saw that I had repaired it before. He asked me what objects held the enchantment and I told him: the brooch, the snake skin, and so on.
And as I spoke he only had to look at me in his knowing way, for me to understand him. The objects were of my Father’s time, and while his memory and honor will never fade from my mind, more than twenty years have passed.
I comprehended my patron at once: it was time that I replaced the foci of the enchantment with my own. Not only Rupert’s ring, but new things.
What could I use? I have been alone so long. I have lost a child and there has been no help for me. I have only one thing remaining: my vengeance. And so I will take the things of my enemies. I will take them from under their noses, from their own homes. Their sorrow, and my satisfaction in it, will be the force that keeps Blackthorn Hall safe—safe from them! It is the kind of cunning that my patron is known for, and that he loves best.
And once my protections have returned to their fullest strength, they will finally pay for their sins. They will pay in their blood.
Eesh. Makes me shiver just reading it. I guess she didn’t actually make them pay in their blood or Tessa and Jem probably would have mentioned it. (They would have been some of the blood-payers, I’m pretty sure.) So let’s summarize, Bruce: the ghost is Rupert Blackthorn, Tatiana’s husband. He died in some kind of tragedy and she blamed the families Tessa and Jem talked about—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Lightwoods…So she stole their stuff.
My beloved Sophie, you will never read this. On the bottom shelf of the bookcases built into the far wall of my bedroom here in Cirenworth—Cirenworth! you say, but ah, I will explain—are my diaries, in all shapes and forms, from leatherbound quartos of heavy ivory pages to spiralbound ruled notebooks for children to use in school. There are gaps, sometimes of years, and a few that have been lost or damaged, or whose paper was never intended to last as long as I have lived. But each of them is written to someone—I never understood “Dear Diary,” as though Diary were a person I might want to know my thoughts. But you, of course, I do wish to know. And it has been many decades, Sophie, since I have started one of these diaries and addressed it to you. But today brings a fresh start in a new volume, a lovely little book of swirly Florentine paper, and so I address it to you:
Hello, Sophie Lightwood, née Collins, my first true friend in London. You have been gone so long. And yet it also seems only a moment; I turn and see your graceful figure as you hurry down the hall with a basket in your arms, or the way you smiled when you said you were allowed to speak to Will however rudely you liked (and he did deserve it at the time!) or the way you laughed with Gideon over scones.
So: Cirenworth. I live here with Jem now, you know. He is no longer a Silent Brother—well, that is not relevant to my entry today so I suggest you consult one of the earlier diaries to catch up and come back when you’re done. And we have just been visited by his cousin Emma Carstairs, and her paramour, Julian Blackthorn. (Don’t worry; the Blackthorns of his generation are quite kind and friendly!) She has been keeping a diary herself, to record their restoration of Blackthorn Hall in Chiswick, which has remained mostly unoccupied all this time and has fallen into ruin. (Well, further ruin, I suppose.) And, of course, that old pile of bricks has all kinds of magical problems that they’re having to sort out, although of course they were also eager to see us—Jem and I, and Mina and Kit.
Yes, I’m a mother again, Sophie, and that makes me miss you. How good it was to have you by my side in those early days. I remember one evening, when there was a gathering at the Institute—some sort of party, it doesn’t matter, but James was a baby and Thomas was a baby. Someone, maybe old Lysander Gladstone, was trying to engage us in conversation, and I remember we fell asleep against one another right there on the loveseat, and the babies too. When we woke up it turned out Lysander had been highly offended and Will had had to explain to him about babies and new mothers. And we both startled because the children were gone, but of course Will and Gideon had come and retrieved them and put them in the nursery, and let us nap together there.
I miss those moments with you.
Mina is only a toddler, and Jem’s daughter, and thank the Angel she has something of his temperament. It has been a long time since I had to chase a little one across the dining room floor, but she is sweet-natured and easygoing, most of the time. And we have an older son, Kit, who came to live with us after his father was killed. He is a distant relation in the Herondale line, but he does not feel distant at all. He completes our family in a way I could not have imagined, and in a way I’m sure he never expected. He is also a teenager, and he had his own life before he came to us, so between those truths he often keeps things to himself. And so—as one does with teenagers—I worry about him. He has friends—even a girlfriend, if I’m correct in my observations—and he loves Mina with a fierceness that often surprises even him. But there is a heaviness in the way he carries himself sometimes, a sadness that he won’t, or can’t, speak to us about. And maybe it is only that he’s faced so much loss so young, but I can’t help the feeling there’s something more.
I do want to tell you more about Kit, and where he came from—it’s all much more dramatic than you’re probably imagining—but it is late and I can talk to you about Kit anytime. I wish instead to digress and tell you about Julian and Emma’s visit.
They are pulling at the knots of a few mysteries regarding Blackthorn Hall—a curse on the house that dates back to guess who, Benedict Lightwood (I know, Sophie, who could have guessed). And a ghost, benign but faint and unidentified, probably trapped by the curse. There are a whole set of objects, it seems, connected to the curse, and the ghost told them to bring one of them here to Cirenworth—hence their visit, though as I say, I don’t think they minded an excuse to see Kit or Mina.
We were washing up after supper and Jem—you know how Jem is—said straightaway to them, well, let’s see these objects you found.
Julian fetched them from his bag and put them on the counter: a silver-plated whisky flask, quite tarnished, and a dagger, also quite banged up by time. Neither meant much to me at first—as you’ll know, both flasks and daggers are very common in London Shadowhunter homes, even today—but Jem recognized the weapon immediately.
He pointed at the inscription on it and read out, “I wanted so much to have a gleaming dagger, that each of my ribs became a dagger.”
Both Julian and Emma fairly goggled at him. (I also think they don’t realize that Jem does things like this precisely so people will goggle at him; he only pretends to be perfectly dramatic by nature.) “You know it?” said Julian, while at the same time Emma said, “You readFarsi?”
“I’d recognize it anywhere,” Jem said. “It belonged to my cousin, Alastair Carstairs, though it came to him from his mother’s family.”
“The ghost said to bring it here,” Emma said. “To bring it home.”
Jem picked up the flask, which turned out to have a monogram on it. “Oh my,” he said, his voice quiet, and showed me the initials.
My poor dear Matthew. He came into my mind immediately, with his laughing eyes and his bright smile. Julian said they’d already figured out it was his. But that was very strange, I pointed out, because if Benedict was responsible for the curse, he was dead almost ten years before Matthew was even born. Julian started to say it didn’t make sense to them either, and was part of the mystery still. But then there was a sudden loud clicking, which turned out to be the Sensor they had with them that their brother Ty modified for ghosts. (Ty is a whole other fascinating topic, Sophie, but he will have to wait for another day.) They—I mean Shadowhunters in general, not just Julian and Emma—are still using Henry’s demon Sensor invention all these years later!
The Sensor led us to the library. Emma seemed dubious.
“Come on,” she said to the Sensor. “I’m sure the Cirenworth library has been haunted for years.”
“Not to my knowledge,” Jem said. “Although there are houses in the English countryside where if you brought that thing inside it would howl like a police siren. Cirenworth has been well-maintained continually and the owners have always been very thorough about ghosts.”
Using a Sensor to find a ghost is not quite like using it to find a demon. You can tell you’ve found a demon because, you know—the demon is standing there. With ghosts it’s much more a game of “hotter” and “colder,” and eventually we all agreed the clicking was loudest in front of one particular shelf. We took the books down from that shelf and lay them on the table and checked them with the Sensor, and the winner was a quarto book bound in leather. Nothing on the spine, but a quite beautiful compass rose etched into the front.
We opened it, and when I saw the inside, I gasped. And I knew I would be writing this new diary of mine, to you. You would know it yourself—cramped, neat handwriting, with a strong leftward slant, and entirely in Spanish. It was your son’s journal, of course. Thomas’s. My heart! My memories raced back to you holding him, such a small child (who grew to be such a tall broad-chested man!).
Emma was looking through it. This was the first she’d heard of Thomas, perhaps (there are still Lightwoods around, never fear, but they live in New York), so of course she didn’t have the sentimental reaction Jem and I did. “The problem, of course,” she said, “is that my Spanish is terrible.”
So then Julian of course teased her a little, because Emma’s best friend Cristina is from Mexico City. Emma said that was the problem, whenever she needed to read or say anything in Spanish Cristina could just help her.
“Do we need it translated?” Julian said. “We don’t know that it has anything to do with the curse or the ghost. The flask was just a flask as far as we know, right?”
Jem was shaking his head, though. He put the flask and dagger down next to the book and gave them a look. “I don’t know if you realize it, but these three objects all come from the same era. The owners of all three were the same generation and almost the same age. They were all friends.”
And then I could see all of them in my mind—Thomas, Matthew, Alastair, but also Christopher and Cordelia and my own James and Lucie. It was all so long ago, but I could call up their faces as though it were yesterday. As I can call up yours, Sophie. I looked at Jem and I could tell he was thinking the same thing, but all he said to Julian and Emma was, “It can’t be a coincidence. But Benedict Lightwood never knew any of them, he’d been dead for years by then. Are you sure he’s the one responsible for the curse?”
Emma said they were fairly sure—that they’d been reading a diary they’d found in the house that spelled it out. Whose? Oh, Sophie, you have already guessed. Tatiana Blackthorn’s.
“She was about our age, I think,” Julian said. “Maybe a little younger. He told her about the curse and the objects.”
I think Emma saw the expression in my face and Jem’s. “Did they…” She touched the flask, the dagger, the book, one after the other. “Matthew, Alastair, Thomas, did they know Tatiana Blackthorn?”
“She knew them,” Jem said darkly.
“She hated them,” I explained. “She hated all our families—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Fairchilds. And the other Lightwoods. She became…rather more and more unpleasant as time went on. More and more obsessed, I might say, with harming us.”
Julian had been looking into the distance. Now he suddenly turned to take in the objects on the table. “She changed the enchantment,” he said. “She replaced some of the objects. Maybe all of them.”
Clever Julian! We all knew at once it was the likely answer.
“Why, though?” said Emma. “Maybe some of the things Benedict used were lost.”
When Jem spoke, his voice was harder than I’m used to hearing it. “I don’t know how she comes across in her journal. When she was younger she was more mild. But in Tatiana’s heart was a terrible, grasping desire for power. For control. There need not have been anything wrong with Benedict’s curse, for Tatiana to have wanted to make it hers.”
He was right, my dear Sophie, and his words filled my heart with dread. Tatiana cannot hurt Julian and Emma. She is long gone. But she reaches out from the years past to bring her evil even to today. Whomever this ghost is at Blackthorn Hall, I pray, at least, that it is no one that we loved.
To the Blackthorn Nephilim residing at Blackthorn Manor, Chiswick
FromHypatia Vex, Fellow, Spiral Labyrinth
My greetings. Attached please find the first pages of Tatiana Blackthorn’s diary that I have translated from Purgatic. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought that Magnus Bane might shed some light on the situation that caused you to bring the diary to me, and he did, speaking of a curse upon the house. I have skipped over a number of entries related to the author’s clothes, opinions about her peers, complaints about the weather, and so on, in favor of one that I think will be of special interest (though it rather contradicts what I think of as the history of the house — Benedict Lightwood of course was hardly known to be trustworthy, or perhaps things have altered since his time. A mystery to be delved into, perhaps?)
I will be in touch soon with further translation.
Yours,
H. Vex
Dear Diary, tonight I am in a state of rare elation. It seems that my patience and care may not be as worthless as they are usually assumed to be by the members of this family. For I believe that Father has at long last come to accept and even approve of my betrothal to Rupert! (Oh, happy day, oh darlingRupert!) More astonishing, he has communicated this not by anything so clumsy as an awkward sentimental statement, but instead by taking me into his confidence, and telling me of things that I am sure he has never shared with my brothers.
It was after supper. The Terrible Gs were off whacking at each other with swords, or some such nonsense. Father usually repairs to his study, of course, but tonight he came over to me and, out of the blue, asked me to accompany him there. I dutifully followed.
There he closed the door with care and bade me sit in one of the wing-chairs facing his desk. He settled himself in his own chair and began by telling me that the Lightwood name is a powerful and ancient one.
I replied that I knew that and, indeed, never forgot it.
He continued to say that such a name brings with it great prestige and influence, but also great enmity. The adversaries of the Lightwoods were many, he said. “And I speak not of the demons we make war on, or even of the half-demons permitted to roam the earth on our sufferance, but of those of our own race, that is, the Nephilim.” He explained that there was great envy towards us, and while it would not be expressed directly, there were those who would seek to destroy us.
I asked him who he was thinking of in particular, but he demurred. The enemies change, he said, with the times; alliances form and crumble, as the varying Shadowhunter families’ interests are altered by time and fate.
(I am recording his words as exactly as I can recall them, Diary. I admire the forceful manner by which he expresses himself, and wish to take it upon myself, since the others in my family do not.)
He went on to explain that while it is not widely known, we are well-protected here in Lightwood House, not only by the sound brick and stone, but by an enchantment that affects the house and its grounds themselves.
An enchantment! I was astonished. I knew that magic was a subject of interest to Father, and that his researches led him to minor experimentations. I had no idea that he had accomplished so much. This I expressed in, I hope, a complimentary manner. He said that it had taken him several years to make the preparations, for he did not trust anyone, even a warlock paid well for their silence, with the knowledge of the house’s protection.
The enchantment is very elaborate, as I understand, and its effects somewhat difficult to communicate. Father said that it served both to prevent other Nephilim from investigating the house, and to keep areas of the house, and possessions of the family, hidden from discovery. I asked by what means did the enchantment work, and he said that it had to do with ley-lines, the seams of magic that cross the earth, and a half-dozen objects selected and placed at locations along those ley-lines that are a matter of elaborate calculation.
I pressed him for more detail, reminding him that I shared his interest in the topic of magic, but that was all he would tell. He explained that I was as yet an unmarried girl who need not trouble herself with the ways of the world—and here I finally reach the reason for telling this story, Diary.
As he spoke of me, he gave me a look, one that at first I could not translate. But soon enough I realized: he said that I was “as yet” unmarried. By the glint in his eye I understand what he was saying: you will soon be a married woman.
And so all comes clear, in a beautiful burst of triumph!
Father accepts Rupert, and will approve our marriage—
This will cause me to gain my majority—
That will cause Father to take me further into his confidence about the nature of Lightwood House and his work in magic—
Becausehe understands that whatever the Law may say, I am the right and proper heir of his goals and his work—
And because he intends Rupert and I to become the masters of this Manor after him!
Though my efforts have been long and arduous, Diary, and I have feared they would never come to fruition, I sleep tonight with victory within my grasp, and only pity for my poor brothers, too vacuous and pigheaded to even understand what has happened while they beat each other with sticks in the training room.
Dear Diary, I am inconsolable. As planned, I importuned Papa to beg him for mercy. It was my last-ditch attempt to be permitted to stay home tonight rather than to attend the ball at the Institute. It was a bad plan, I recognize now. He was in his private study, and he hates to be interrupted there; when I came in he had only an unfriendly look for me, and I should have retreated right then. Lessons learned, I suppose.
The upshot is that I, quote, must, unquote, attend the ball at the Institute tonight, as—so I am told—the Name of the Lightwoods depends upon it. I told him that if Gabriel attended — as Gideon has abandoned us for Spain — this would surely be enough to show the Lightwood flag. But he only shook his head, muttered something about how “tongues would wag,” and waved me away. I suggested that I could be reported to be unable to attend due to temporary illness of a non-specified womanly nature. For that suggestion I was cast out of the study immediately, of course.
The name of the Lightwoods! What care I for the name of the Lightwoods? What good has the name of the Lightwoods ever done for me? My only purpose in life, after all, is meant to be to find a better last name to replace it with. And what a grand entrance I will make at this party towards that purpose, attending the ball on the arms of my disgusting brothers, my escorts of last resort.
Not that I will find any sympathy in this house. Gabriel seems perfectly happy to attend the ball without escorting any lady besides his sister. He does not understand, being soft of brain and even softer of heart, that the favor of our father is bestowed easily, carelessly, upon him, because he is a boy, whereas I must work ten times as hard for less than one-tenth the approval. By the Angel…Gideon abandoned the family to drink wine and sun himself in Spain, and Papa still treats him better than me. His travel year! As though it is some unbreachable commandment handed down by Raziel himself. It is tradition and tradition is happily broken for the sake of family. We need Gideon here—Papa needs Gideon here. I will never forgive him for having left us, the great lummox.
Gabriel, of course, only grows worse in the absence of his personal hero Hideous Gideon. He wishes to be taken seriously now and so he acts like Father, and it is like watching a dog try to walk on its hind legs. An embarrassment of pomposity and egomania the like of which is, I daresay, a black mark on the Lightwood name far worse than any harm I could do by staying home from a party.
I go now to dress for the ball, weighed down by the burden of my fate.
Midnight
Dear Diary, I know I am not in the habit of writing more than once in a day but I had to take you up immediately upon returning from the party because a miracle has occurred. I have met a boy—no, a man, a wonderful man. His name is Rupert Blackthorn — though he is not one of the tedious Blackthorns from the Cornwall Institute. He usually lives in Leeds, but he is here visiting family friends. He is the most beautiful man ever to have lived. His hair is deep black as midnight, and his eyes are emerald orbs that gaze into one’s soul. Every girl in the Institute was watching him, hoping he would give them a dance, and he came right to me, without hesitation, and smiled at me and asked me. And I danced with him and it was glorious. Even better yet, he had no interest in anyone at the party but me. I do believe he even gave Gabriel the cut direct when Gabriel tried to start talking about himself, at one point. I am not entirely sure; it was quite loud and he might only not have heard. But I choose to believe it was a deliberate snub. From the most desirable boy in the whole detestable building.
When I wrote earlier I was the lowest of the low in this house, but now I am raised up triumphant. I danced with a beautiful dark-haired man who said my name as though it were poetry. The name of the Lightwoods indeed! Take that,Will Herondale!
if Jesse ends up being a traitor and just used Lucie to get him revived form the dead with reverse psychology and has been helping his mother all this time I swear to god—
Ah, it’s good to get back to the dank, gloomy ruin that is Cursed Blackthorn Hall. You know, I’ll almost miss the curse, when it’s gone. Just kidding! Cirenworth proves you can have an old manor house with hundreds of years of history and it can be warm and welcoming and friendly.
We got back yesterday night, and then this morning Hypatia came in with a few more translated bits of Tatiana’s diary. (Don’t worry, Bruce: you are my One True Diary. Tatiana’s diary means nothing to me, I swear, nothing!) She was a big weirdo about it as usual, of course; the translations are all on these large parchment pages that look like movie props but no, Hypatia just likes to use ancient yellowing vellums for her normal work here in the twenty-first century. Warlocks! She said something about treated pages, demon language, and so on. And she was wearing kind of a 40s burgundy dress with a matching hat and Bruce, the brim of this hat was so wide I thought the wind would carry her away. (Oh, I should have said, we were outside. Julian was on the roof with the builders, not my favorite thing, so I was watching from the front gates while I tried to cut back the briars, which grow here at like ten times the rate of anything in California despite the much worse weather. I pointed this out to one of the faeries and he looked at me and said, “Black. Thorn.” And then walked away as though he’d made a great point. But it was Lightwood House first, I yelled back, and he ignored me. Which is for the best, really.)
I’m pretty sure the briars had grown another few inches while we talked, but they would have to wait. I got Julian down from the roof and we went in to read.
It looks like Hypatia has started actually thinking about what she’s translating; instead of doing every entry, this time she had snippets from a bunch of entries put together (she dated each one). Which is a little bit of a shame because I kind of liked seeing Tatiana talk about her clothes or her brothers or whatever in between all the, you know, evil demon stuff. But I admit that evil demon stuff is what we are here for. Like the old Shadowhunter motto says, “Shadowhunters: That Evil Demon Stuff Is What We Are Here For.” But in Latin probably.
Some translated highlights for you, Bruce. I won’t include the dates, but they stretch over a matter of years. The first one is from 1878 and then most are in the 1880s, but then there’s a jump and the last one is from 1903. (Sometime before then she seems to have found a “patron” of some kind, but she doesn’t say who it is. Or why anybody would want to be the patron of such an unpleasant person…)
Father is dead and Rupert is dead. I cannot speak of what happened; when I try, the words will not come. It is the fault of the London Enclave, many of whom were present for their deaths. Not only did they not save either of the men I love most, I daresay they hastened the disaster. I shall be, at very least, registering a formal complaint with the Clave, but I have little hope of justice, of course. The corruption among the Nephilim here in London goes all the way to the roots.
I cannot believe I have been left all alone. My mother, gone. My brothers, gone. The walls of Lightwood House are my only companions, their silence a terrible reminder of how much I have lost, in such little time. Today I went from room to room, and wherever I found a mirror, I smashed it. The glass I left where it fell, a reminder that everything bright and good has been destroyed.
I have Rupert’s ring. It is all that remains of him. I know I must have felt happy, to stand beside him and recite the vows of marriage. I cannot dredge up the memory of that feeling. There is blood upon the ring. His blood. I shall never clean it.
To honor my father’s memory, I have begun going through the books in his library. Not the library the Clave knows about, of course, the one they pillaged after the incident involving his death, but the other one, Father’s sanctum, which the enchantment hides. I wish to learn what he knew. To seek power that will help me, who now has been left with nothing. I have found only one thing that causes my heart to beat in my chest: because of his violent end, far from his own home, it is not unlikely that the spirit of my Rupert may still be present here in the house. If he is here, I will find him. I will see him, and I will know that our love is more powerful than death.
I have searched and searched, performed spell after spell. I have not seen any ghost, not of Rupert, not of Father. Not even of some Lightwood relation long dead who might have been haunting the place earlier. Is it my father’s enchantment that keeps the dead from this place? Or does it only prevent my finding them? But I am the master of that enchantment now, as I am the true inheritor of the house. (If G and G attempt to take it from me, they will find there is more than an enchantment that will work against them.)
Father’s protection is fading. I can feel it, as I remain here in the house, and it becomes a part of me, as I become a part of it. Someday my son will inherit the house—the last gift that Rupert ever gave me—and I will not have Blackthorn Hall made unsafe for myself and my family. I have been reading extensively on the topic of the enchantment and I place the blame on the urn containing mother’s ashes, which fell from its location in the Lightwood tombs in the countryside and chipped terribly. It did not shatter, but since then I have felt the eyes of the world more upon me. But I believe that the objects themselves can be replaced, as long as the magic is renewed, and so instead of the urn the enchantment now inhabits Father’s mourning brooch, with its locks of Mother’s hair, and I have put it in the place of the urn. The spell has been rewoven and renewed. Father would be proud of me. He was right to make me the inheritor of all his works.
Rupert is here, I know it, though I cannot see him or hear him. Where else, indeed, could he be other than close to me, where he belonged, where he was meant to dwell before his life was cut so short by the machinations of the Enclave. Sometimes in the night I feel I can almost see him, as though he is hiding just behind a thin curtain that divides the living realm from the dead. And now I have made sure he will stay with me.
I realized that the objects of the protective enchantment on the house are things that would be important to Father, when he was master here. But now I am master here, and having studied more fully Father’s research, it was a simple matter to place his ring in a location of power. It will be part of the spell from here on, protecting the house as Rupert would have protected me.
You can see, Bruce, the way the last entry seems…different?
Vengeance. Vindication. They are close.
But the power of the house fades. At the worst time.
I appealed to my patron. He said the magic was of my own doing and that only I may repair it. But—for he is perceptive beyond any other—he saw that I had repaired it before. He asked me what objects held the enchantment and I told him: the brooch, the snake skin, and so on.
And as I spoke he only had to look at me in his knowing way, for me to understand him. The objects were of my Father’s time, and while his memory and honor will never fade from my mind, more than twenty years have passed.
I comprehended my patron at once: it was time that I replaced the foci of the enchantment with my own. Not only Rupert’s ring, but new things.
What could I use? I have been alone so long. I have lost a child and there has been no help for me. I have only one thing remaining: my vengeance. And so I will take the things of my enemies. I will take them from under their noses, from their own homes. Their sorrow, and my satisfaction in it, will be the force that keeps Blackthorn Hall safe—safe from them! It is the kind of cunning that my patron is known for, and that he loves best.
And once my protections have returned to their fullest strength, they will finally pay for their sins. They will pay in their blood.
Eesh. Makes me shiver just reading it. I guess she didn’t actually make them pay in their blood or Tessa and Jem probably would have mentioned it. (They would have been some of the blood-payers, I’m pretty sure.) So let’s summarize, Bruce: the ghost is Rupert Blackthorn, Tatiana’s husband. He died in some kind of tragedy and she blamed the families Tessa and Jem talked about—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Lightwoods…So she stole their stuff.
Ah, it’s good to get back to the dank, gloomy ruin that is Cursed Blackthorn Hall. You know, I’ll almost miss the curse, when it’s gone. Just kidding! Cirenworth proves you can have an old manor house with hundreds of years of history and it can be warm and welcoming and friendly.
We got back yesterday night, and then this morning Hypatia came in with a few more translated bits of Tatiana’s diary. (Don’t worry, Bruce: you are my One True Diary. Tatiana’s diary means nothing to me, I swear, nothing!) She was a big weirdo about it as usual, of course; the translations are all on these large parchment pages that look like movie props but no, Hypatia just likes to use ancient yellowing vellums for her normal work here in the twenty-first century. Warlocks! She said something about treated pages, demon language, and so on. And she was wearing kind of a 40s burgundy dress with a matching hat and Bruce, the brim of this hat was so wide I thought the wind would carry her away. (Oh, I should have said, we were outside. Julian was on the roof with the builders, not my favorite thing, so I was watching from the front gates while I tried to cut back the briars, which grow here at like ten times the rate of anything in California despite the much worse weather. I pointed this out to one of the faeries and he looked at me and said, “Black. Thorn.” And then walked away as though he’d made a great point. But it was Lightwood House first, I yelled back, and he ignored me. Which is for the best, really.)
I’m pretty sure the briars had grown another few inches while we talked, but they would have to wait. I got Julian down from the roof and we went in to read.
It looks like Hypatia has started actually thinking about what she’s translating; instead of doing every entry, this time she had snippets from a bunch of entries put together (she dated each one). Which is a little bit of a shame because I kind of liked seeing Tatiana talk about her clothes or her brothers or whatever in between all the, you know, evil demon stuff. But I admit that evil demon stuff is what we are here for. Like the old Shadowhunter motto says, “Shadowhunters: That Evil Demon Stuff Is What We Are Here For.” But in Latin probably.
Some translated highlights for you, Bruce. I won’t include the dates, but they stretch over a matter of years. The first one is from 1878 and then most are in the 1880s, but then there’s a jump and the last one is from 1903. (Sometime before then she seems to have found a “patron” of some kind, but she doesn’t say who it is. Or why anybody would want to be the patron of such an unpleasant person…)
Father is dead and Rupert is dead. I cannot speak of what happened; when I try, the words will not come. It is the fault of the London Enclave, many of whom were present for their deaths. Not only did they not save either of the men I love most, I daresay they hastened the disaster. I shall be, at very least, registering a formal complaint with the Clave, but I have little hope of justice, of course. The corruption among the Nephilim here in London goes all the way to the roots.
I cannot believe I have been left all alone. My mother, gone. My brothers, gone. The walls of Lightwood House are my only companions, their silence a terrible reminder of how much I have lost, in such little time. Today I went from room to room, and wherever I found a mirror, I smashed it. The glass I left where it fell, a reminder that everything bright and good has been destroyed.
I have Rupert’s ring. It is all that remains of him. I know I must have felt happy, to stand beside him and recite the vows of marriage. I cannot dredge up the memory of that feeling. There is blood upon the ring. His blood. I shall never clean it.
To honor my father’s memory, I have begun going through the books in his library. Not the library the Clave knows about, of course, the one they pillaged after the incident involving his death, but the other one, Father’s sanctum, which the enchantment hides. I wish to learn what he knew. To seek power that will help me, who now has been left with nothing. I have found only one thing that causes my heart to beat in my chest: because of his violent end, far from his own home, it is not unlikely that the spirit of my Rupert may still be present here in the house. If he is here, I will find him. I will see him, and I will know that our love is more powerful than death.
I have searched and searched, performed spell after spell. I have not seen any ghost, not of Rupert, not of Father. Not even of some Lightwood relation long dead who might have been haunting the place earlier. Is it my father’s enchantment that keeps the dead from this place? Or does it only prevent my finding them? But I am the master of that enchantment now, as I am the true inheritor of the house. (If G and G attempt to take it from me, they will find there is more than an enchantment that will work against them.)
Father’s protection is fading. I can feel it, as I remain here in the house, and it becomes a part of me, as I become a part of it. Someday my son will inherit the house—the last gift that Rupert ever gave me—and I will not have Blackthorn Hall made unsafe for myself and my family. I have been reading extensively on the topic of the enchantment and I place the blame on the urn containing mother’s ashes, which fell from its location in the Lightwood tombs in the countryside and chipped terribly. It did not shatter, but since then I have felt the eyes of the world more upon me. But I believe that the objects themselves can be replaced, as long as the magic is renewed, and so instead of the urn the enchantment now inhabits Father’s mourning brooch, with its locks of Mother’s hair, and I have put it in the place of the urn. The spell has been rewoven and renewed. Father would be proud of me. He was right to make me the inheritor of all his works.
Rupert is here, I know it, though I cannot see him or hear him. Where else, indeed, could he be other than close to me, where he belonged, where he was meant to dwell before his life was cut so short by the machinations of the Enclave. Sometimes in the night I feel I can almost see him, as though he is hiding just behind a thin curtain that divides the living realm from the dead. And now I have made sure he will stay with me.
I realized that the objects of the protective enchantment on the house are things that would be important to Father, when he was master here. But now I am master here, and having studied more fully Father’s research, it was a simple matter to place his ring in a location of power. It will be part of the spell from here on, protecting the house as Rupert would have protected me.
You can see, Bruce, the way the last entry seems…different?
Vengeance. Vindication. They are close.
But the power of the house fades. At the worst time.
I appealed to my patron. He said the magic was of my own doing and that only I may repair it. But—for he is perceptive beyond any other—he saw that I had repaired it before. He asked me what objects held the enchantment and I told him: the brooch, the snake skin, and so on.
And as I spoke he only had to look at me in his knowing way, for me to understand him. The objects were of my Father’s time, and while his memory and honor will never fade from my mind, more than twenty years have passed.
I comprehended my patron at once: it was time that I replaced the foci of the enchantment with my own. Not only Rupert’s ring, but new things.
What could I use? I have been alone so long. I have lost a child and there has been no help for me. I have only one thing remaining: my vengeance. And so I will take the things of my enemies. I will take them from under their noses, from their own homes. Their sorrow, and my satisfaction in it, will be the force that keeps Blackthorn Hall safe—safe from them! It is the kind of cunning that my patron is known for, and that he loves best.
And once my protections have returned to their fullest strength, they will finally pay for their sins. They will pay in their blood.
Eesh. Makes me shiver just reading it. I guess she didn’t actually make them pay in their blood or Tessa and Jem probably would have mentioned it. (They would have been some of the blood-payers, I’m pretty sure.) So let’s summarize, Bruce: the ghost is Rupert Blackthorn, Tatiana’s husband. He died in some kind of tragedy and she blamed the families Tessa and Jem talked about—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Lightwoods…So she stole their stuff.
My beloved Sophie, you will never read this. On the bottom shelf of the bookcases built into the far wall of my bedroom here in Cirenworth—Cirenworth! you say, but ah, I will explain—are my diaries, in all shapes and forms, from leatherbound quartos of heavy ivory pages to spiralbound ruled notebooks for children to use in school. There are gaps, sometimes of years, and a few that have been lost or damaged, or whose paper was never intended to last as long as I have lived. But each of them is written to someone—I never understood “Dear Diary,” as though Diary were a person I might want to know my thoughts. But you, of course, I do wish to know. And it has been many decades, Sophie, since I have started one of these diaries and addressed it to you. But today brings a fresh start in a new volume, a lovely little book of swirly Florentine paper, and so I address it to you:
Hello, Sophie Lightwood, née Collins, my first true friend in London. You have been gone so long. And yet it also seems only a moment; I turn and see your graceful figure as you hurry down the hall with a basket in your arms, or the way you smiled when you said you were allowed to speak to Will however rudely you liked (and he did deserve it at the time!) or the way you laughed with Gideon over scones.
So: Cirenworth. I live here with Jem now, you know. He is no longer a Silent Brother—well, that is not relevant to my entry today so I suggest you consult one of the earlier diaries to catch up and come back when you’re done. And we have just been visited by his cousin Emma Carstairs, and her paramour, Julian Blackthorn. (Don’t worry; the Blackthorns of his generation are quite kind and friendly!) She has been keeping a diary herself, to record their restoration of Blackthorn Hall in Chiswick, which has remained mostly unoccupied all this time and has fallen into ruin. (Well, further ruin, I suppose.) And, of course, that old pile of bricks has all kinds of magical problems that they’re having to sort out, although of course they were also eager to see us—Jem and I, and Mina and Kit.
Yes, I’m a mother again, Sophie, and that makes me miss you. How good it was to have you by my side in those early days. I remember one evening, when there was a gathering at the Institute—some sort of party, it doesn’t matter, but James was a baby and Thomas was a baby. Someone, maybe old Lysander Gladstone, was trying to engage us in conversation, and I remember we fell asleep against one another right there on the loveseat, and the babies too. When we woke up it turned out Lysander had been highly offended and Will had had to explain to him about babies and new mothers. And we both startled because the children were gone, but of course Will and Gideon had come and retrieved them and put them in the nursery, and let us nap together there.
I miss those moments with you.
Mina is only a toddler, and Jem’s daughter, and thank the Angel she has something of his temperament. It has been a long time since I had to chase a little one across the dining room floor, but she is sweet-natured and easygoing, most of the time. And we have an older son, Kit, who came to live with us after his father was killed. He is a distant relation in the Herondale line, but he does not feel distant at all. He completes our family in a way I could not have imagined, and in a way I’m sure he never expected. He is also a teenager, and he had his own life before he came to us, so between those truths he often keeps things to himself. And so—as one does with teenagers—I worry about him. He has friends—even a girlfriend, if I’m correct in my observations—and he loves Mina with a fierceness that often surprises even him. But there is a heaviness in the way he carries himself sometimes, a sadness that he won’t, or can’t, speak to us about. And maybe it is only that he’s faced so much loss so young, but I can’t help the feeling there’s something more.
I do want to tell you more about Kit, and where he came from—it’s all much more dramatic than you’re probably imagining—but it is late and I can talk to you about Kit anytime. I wish instead to digress and tell you about Julian and Emma’s visit.
They are pulling at the knots of a few mysteries regarding Blackthorn Hall—a curse on the house that dates back to guess who, Benedict Lightwood (I know, Sophie, who could have guessed). And a ghost, benign but faint and unidentified, probably trapped by the curse. There are a whole set of objects, it seems, connected to the curse, and the ghost told them to bring one of them here to Cirenworth—hence their visit, though as I say, I don’t think they minded an excuse to see Kit or Mina.
We were washing up after supper and Jem—you know how Jem is—said straightaway to them, well, let’s see these objects you found.
Julian fetched them from his bag and put them on the counter: a silver-plated whisky flask, quite tarnished, and a dagger, also quite banged up by time. Neither meant much to me at first—as you’ll know, both flasks and daggers are very common in London Shadowhunter homes, even today—but Jem recognized the weapon immediately.
He pointed at the inscription on it and read out, “I wanted so much to have a gleaming dagger, that each of my ribs became a dagger.”
Both Julian and Emma fairly goggled at him. (I also think they don’t realize that Jem does things like this precisely so people will goggle at him; he only pretends to be perfectly dramatic by nature.) “You know it?” said Julian, while at the same time Emma said, “You readFarsi?”
“I’d recognize it anywhere,” Jem said. “It belonged to my cousin, Alastair Carstairs, though it came to him from his mother’s family.”
“The ghost said to bring it here,” Emma said. “To bring it home.”
Jem picked up the flask, which turned out to have a monogram on it. “Oh my,” he said, his voice quiet, and showed me the initials.
My poor dear Matthew. He came into my mind immediately, with his laughing eyes and his bright smile. Julian said they’d already figured out it was his. But that was very strange, I pointed out, because if Benedict was responsible for the curse, he was dead almost ten years before Matthew was even born. Julian started to say it didn’t make sense to them either, and was part of the mystery still. But then there was a sudden loud clicking, which turned out to be the Sensor they had with them that their brother Ty modified for ghosts. (Ty is a whole other fascinating topic, Sophie, but he will have to wait for another day.) They—I mean Shadowhunters in general, not just Julian and Emma—are still using Henry’s demon Sensor invention all these years later!
The Sensor led us to the library. Emma seemed dubious.
“Come on,” she said to the Sensor. “I’m sure the Cirenworth library has been haunted for years.”
“Not to my knowledge,” Jem said. “Although there are houses in the English countryside where if you brought that thing inside it would howl like a police siren. Cirenworth has been well-maintained continually and the owners have always been very thorough about ghosts.”
Using a Sensor to find a ghost is not quite like using it to find a demon. You can tell you’ve found a demon because, you know—the demon is standing there. With ghosts it’s much more a game of “hotter” and “colder,” and eventually we all agreed the clicking was loudest in front of one particular shelf. We took the books down from that shelf and lay them on the table and checked them with the Sensor, and the winner was a quarto book bound in leather. Nothing on the spine, but a quite beautiful compass rose etched into the front.
We opened it, and when I saw the inside, I gasped. And I knew I would be writing this new diary of mine, to you. You would know it yourself—cramped, neat handwriting, with a strong leftward slant, and entirely in Spanish. It was your son’s journal, of course. Thomas’s. My heart! My memories raced back to you holding him, such a small child (who grew to be such a tall broad-chested man!).
Emma was looking through it. This was the first she’d heard of Thomas, perhaps (there are still Lightwoods around, never fear, but they live in New York), so of course she didn’t have the sentimental reaction Jem and I did. “The problem, of course,” she said, “is that my Spanish is terrible.”
So then Julian of course teased her a little, because Emma’s best friend Cristina is from Mexico City. Emma said that was the problem, whenever she needed to read or say anything in Spanish Cristina could just help her.
“Do we need it translated?” Julian said. “We don’t know that it has anything to do with the curse or the ghost. The flask was just a flask as far as we know, right?”
Jem was shaking his head, though. He put the flask and dagger down next to the book and gave them a look. “I don’t know if you realize it, but these three objects all come from the same era. The owners of all three were the same generation and almost the same age. They were all friends.”
And then I could see all of them in my mind—Thomas, Matthew, Alastair, but also Christopher and Cordelia and my own James and Lucie. It was all so long ago, but I could call up their faces as though it were yesterday. As I can call up yours, Sophie. I looked at Jem and I could tell he was thinking the same thing, but all he said to Julian and Emma was, “It can’t be a coincidence. But Benedict Lightwood never knew any of them, he’d been dead for years by then. Are you sure he’s the one responsible for the curse?”
Emma said they were fairly sure—that they’d been reading a diary they’d found in the house that spelled it out. Whose? Oh, Sophie, you have already guessed. Tatiana Blackthorn’s.
“She was about our age, I think,” Julian said. “Maybe a little younger. He told her about the curse and the objects.”
I think Emma saw the expression in my face and Jem’s. “Did they…” She touched the flask, the dagger, the book, one after the other. “Matthew, Alastair, Thomas, did they know Tatiana Blackthorn?”
“She knew them,” Jem said darkly.
“She hated them,” I explained. “She hated all our families—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Fairchilds. And the other Lightwoods. She became…rather more and more unpleasant as time went on. More and more obsessed, I might say, with harming us.”
Julian had been looking into the distance. Now he suddenly turned to take in the objects on the table. “She changed the enchantment,” he said. “She replaced some of the objects. Maybe all of them.”
Clever Julian! We all knew at once it was the likely answer.
“Why, though?” said Emma. “Maybe some of the things Benedict used were lost.”
When Jem spoke, his voice was harder than I’m used to hearing it. “I don’t know how she comes across in her journal. When she was younger she was more mild. But in Tatiana’s heart was a terrible, grasping desire for power. For control. There need not have been anything wrong with Benedict’s curse, for Tatiana to have wanted to make it hers.”
He was right, my dear Sophie, and his words filled my heart with dread. Tatiana cannot hurt Julian and Emma. She is long gone. But she reaches out from the years past to bring her evil even to today. Whomever this ghost is at Blackthorn Hall, I pray, at least, that it is no one that we loved.
My beloved Sophie, you will never read this. On the bottom shelf of the bookcases built into the far wall of my bedroom here in Cirenworth—Cirenworth! you say, but ah, I will explain—are my diaries, in all shapes and forms, from leatherbound quartos of heavy ivory pages to spiralbound ruled notebooks for children to use in school. There are gaps, sometimes of years, and a few that have been lost or damaged, or whose paper was never intended to last as long as I have lived. But each of them is written to someone—I never understood “Dear Diary,” as though Diary were a person I might want to know my thoughts. But you, of course, I do wish to know. And it has been many decades, Sophie, since I have started one of these diaries and addressed it to you. But today brings a fresh start in a new volume, a lovely little book of swirly Florentine paper, and so I address it to you:
Hello, Sophie Lightwood, née Collins, my first true friend in London. You have been gone so long. And yet it also seems only a moment; I turn and see your graceful figure as you hurry down the hall with a basket in your arms, or the way you smiled when you said you were allowed to speak to Will however rudely you liked (and he did deserve it at the time!) or the way you laughed with Gideon over scones.
So: Cirenworth. I live here with Jem now, you know. He is no longer a Silent Brother—well, that is not relevant to my entry today so I suggest you consult one of the earlier diaries to catch up and come back when you’re done. And we have just been visited by his cousin Emma Carstairs, and her paramour, Julian Blackthorn. (Don’t worry; the Blackthorns of his generation are quite kind and friendly!) She has been keeping a diary herself, to record their restoration of Blackthorn Hall in Chiswick, which has remained mostly unoccupied all this time and has fallen into ruin. (Well, further ruin, I suppose.) And, of course, that old pile of bricks has all kinds of magical problems that they’re having to sort out, although of course they were also eager to see us—Jem and I, and Mina and Kit.
Yes, I’m a mother again, Sophie, and that makes me miss you. How good it was to have you by my side in those early days. I remember one evening, when there was a gathering at the Institute—some sort of party, it doesn’t matter, but James was a baby and Thomas was a baby. Someone, maybe old Lysander Gladstone, was trying to engage us in conversation, and I remember we fell asleep against one another right there on the loveseat, and the babies too. When we woke up it turned out Lysander had been highly offended and Will had had to explain to him about babies and new mothers. And we both startled because the children were gone, but of course Will and Gideon had come and retrieved them and put them in the nursery, and let us nap together there.
I miss those moments with you.
Mina is only a toddler, and Jem’s daughter, and thank the Angel she has something of his temperament. It has been a long time since I had to chase a little one across the dining room floor, but she is sweet-natured and easygoing, most of the time. And we have an older son, Kit, who came to live with us after his father was killed. He is a distant relation in the Herondale line, but he does not feel distant at all. He completes our family in a way I could not have imagined, and in a way I’m sure he never expected. He is also a teenager, and he had his own life before he came to us, so between those truths he often keeps things to himself. And so—as one does with teenagers—I worry about him. He has friends—even a girlfriend, if I’m correct in my observations—and he loves Mina with a fierceness that often surprises even him. But there is a heaviness in the way he carries himself sometimes, a sadness that he won’t, or can’t, speak to us about. And maybe it is only that he’s faced so much loss so young, but I can’t help the feeling there’s something more.
I do want to tell you more about Kit, and where he came from—it’s all much more dramatic than you’re probably imagining—but it is late and I can talk to you about Kit anytime. I wish instead to digress and tell you about Julian and Emma’s visit.
They are pulling at the knots of a few mysteries regarding Blackthorn Hall—a curse on the house that dates back to guess who, Benedict Lightwood (I know, Sophie, who could have guessed). And a ghost, benign but faint and unidentified, probably trapped by the curse. There are a whole set of objects, it seems, connected to the curse, and the ghost told them to bring one of them here to Cirenworth—hence their visit, though as I say, I don’t think they minded an excuse to see Kit or Mina.
We were washing up after supper and Jem—you know how Jem is—said straightaway to them, well, let’s see these objects you found.
Julian fetched them from his bag and put them on the counter: a silver-plated whisky flask, quite tarnished, and a dagger, also quite banged up by time. Neither meant much to me at first—as you’ll know, both flasks and daggers are very common in London Shadowhunter homes, even today—but Jem recognized the weapon immediately.
He pointed at the inscription on it and read out, “I wanted so much to have a gleaming dagger, that each of my ribs became a dagger.”
Both Julian and Emma fairly goggled at him. (I also think they don’t realize that Jem does things like this precisely so people will goggle at him; he only pretends to be perfectly dramatic by nature.) “You know it?” said Julian, while at the same time Emma said, “You readFarsi?”
“I’d recognize it anywhere,” Jem said. “It belonged to my cousin, Alastair Carstairs, though it came to him from his mother’s family.”
“The ghost said to bring it here,” Emma said. “To bring it home.”
Jem picked up the flask, which turned out to have a monogram on it. “Oh my,” he said, his voice quiet, and showed me the initials.
My poor dear Matthew. He came into my mind immediately, with his laughing eyes and his bright smile. Julian said they’d already figured out it was his. But that was very strange, I pointed out, because if Benedict was responsible for the curse, he was dead almost ten years before Matthew was even born. Julian started to say it didn’t make sense to them either, and was part of the mystery still. But then there was a sudden loud clicking, which turned out to be the Sensor they had with them that their brother Ty modified for ghosts. (Ty is a whole other fascinating topic, Sophie, but he will have to wait for another day.) They—I mean Shadowhunters in general, not just Julian and Emma—are still using Henry’s demon Sensor invention all these years later!
The Sensor led us to the library. Emma seemed dubious.
“Come on,” she said to the Sensor. “I’m sure the Cirenworth library has been haunted for years.”
“Not to my knowledge,” Jem said. “Although there are houses in the English countryside where if you brought that thing inside it would howl like a police siren. Cirenworth has been well-maintained continually and the owners have always been very thorough about ghosts.”
Using a Sensor to find a ghost is not quite like using it to find a demon. You can tell you’ve found a demon because, you know—the demon is standing there. With ghosts it’s much more a game of “hotter” and “colder,” and eventually we all agreed the clicking was loudest in front of one particular shelf. We took the books down from that shelf and lay them on the table and checked them with the Sensor, and the winner was a quarto book bound in leather. Nothing on the spine, but a quite beautiful compass rose etched into the front.
We opened it, and when I saw the inside, I gasped. And I knew I would be writing this new diary of mine, to you. You would know it yourself—cramped, neat handwriting, with a strong leftward slant, and entirely in Spanish. It was your son’s journal, of course. Thomas’s. My heart! My memories raced back to you holding him, such a small child (who grew to be such a tall broad-chested man!).
Emma was looking through it. This was the first she’d heard of Thomas, perhaps (there are still Lightwoods around, never fear, but they live in New York), so of course she didn’t have the sentimental reaction Jem and I did. “The problem, of course,” she said, “is that my Spanish is terrible.”
So then Julian of course teased her a little, because Emma’s best friend Cristina is from Mexico City. Emma said that was the problem, whenever she needed to read or say anything in Spanish Cristina could just help her.
“Do we need it translated?” Julian said. “We don’t know that it has anything to do with the curse or the ghost. The flask was just a flask as far as we know, right?”
Jem was shaking his head, though. He put the flask and dagger down next to the book and gave them a look. “I don’t know if you realize it, but these three objects all come from the same era. The owners of all three were the same generation and almost the same age. They were all friends.”
And then I could see all of them in my mind—Thomas, Matthew, Alastair, but also Christopher and Cordelia and my own James and Lucie. It was all so long ago, but I could call up their faces as though it were yesterday. As I can call up yours, Sophie. I looked at Jem and I could tell he was thinking the same thing, but all he said to Julian and Emma was, “It can’t be a coincidence. But Benedict Lightwood never knew any of them, he’d been dead for years by then. Are you sure he’s the one responsible for the curse?”
Emma said they were fairly sure—that they’d been reading a diary they’d found in the house that spelled it out. Whose? Oh, Sophie, you have already guessed. Tatiana Blackthorn’s.
“She was about our age, I think,” Julian said. “Maybe a little younger. He told her about the curse and the objects.”
I think Emma saw the expression in my face and Jem’s. “Did they…” She touched the flask, the dagger, the book, one after the other. “Matthew, Alastair, Thomas, did they know Tatiana Blackthorn?”
“She knew them,” Jem said darkly.
“She hated them,” I explained. “She hated all our families—the Herondales, the Carstairs, the Fairchilds. And the other Lightwoods. She became…rather more and more unpleasant as time went on. More and more obsessed, I might say, with harming us.”
Julian had been looking into the distance. Now he suddenly turned to take in the objects on the table. “She changed the enchantment,” he said. “She replaced some of the objects. Maybe all of them.”
Clever Julian! We all knew at once it was the likely answer.
“Why, though?” said Emma. “Maybe some of the things Benedict used were lost.”
When Jem spoke, his voice was harder than I’m used to hearing it. “I don’t know how she comes across in her journal. When she was younger she was more mild. But in Tatiana’s heart was a terrible, grasping desire for power. For control. There need not have been anything wrong with Benedict’s curse, for Tatiana to have wanted to make it hers.”
He was right, my dear Sophie, and his words filled my heart with dread. Tatiana cannot hurt Juliana and Emma. She is long gone. But she reaches out from the years past to bring her evil even to today. Whomever this ghost is at Blackthorn Hall, I pray, at least, that it is no one that we loved.
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