TATIANA SOON-TO-BE-BLACKTHORNLightwood
JULIAN
Hi Helen and Aline! We just got back from Cirenworth and seeing Jem, Tessa, Kit (and Mina, of course.) I learned a great deal about Kit, about a gun and an old Herondale named James. I have to sort my thoughts out, but in the meantime, here’s a photo of all of us at Cirenworth. You ought to go sometime. It’s a pretty cool place.
J.
JULIAN
Dear Helen and Aline,
Okay, a real letter now. So Emma and I took the train from Paddington Station early in the morning. I suppose we could have gone to the Institute and seen if they’d let us use their Portal, but it seemed like trouble. Besides, it’s not our first train trip in England.
We got off the train at Exeter, a sprawling town with a big Gothic cathedral. Tessa was waiting to pick us up in a racing-green Mini Cooper with Mina strapped into a kid’s seat in the back, wearing goggles. She reminded me of Tavvy when he was littler. Emma got in the back and played peek-a-boo with Mina, and I chatted with Tessa while we rolled through gorgeous green countryside. I hate it when people say “It looked like it does in the movies,” but it kind of did. I kept wanting to get out and paint the scenery.
We drove through a big gate and then up a long road lined with oak and poplar trees. I thought we were in anational park or something—there were trails, and lots of greenery and flowers. Tessa told me the purple ones were bluebells (you’d think they’d be blue), and the yellow ones were celandine. We passed a big glass house and then we came out in front of what I swear I thought was a castle.
I knew Cirenworth was fancy, but I didn’t realize how fancy. It’s a huge pile of gold-colored stone with little turrets, and windows full of leaded glass. There’s a big circular driveway in front, and we parked there in front of steps that looked like a museum entrance. Jem and Kit were waiting for us at the top and Mina started squealing with delight the moment she saw them. It was pretty cute.
We got a tour of the house. It turns out they only use about half of it, and the other half is closed off because it’s too much to take care of. I asked if they’d had to renovate the place and Jem said no, it had never fallen into disrepair like Blackthorn Hall. Tessa said she’d had to redecorate because it had been quite dark “and a little moldy” when they moved in, but she said she’d redecorated before—apparently she fixed up the whole Institute a long time ago. I asked her if she had any advice for us, but she pointed out that back when she’d done the Institute, indoor plumbing had been a new thing.
Kit said they had put the internet into Cirenworth for him. (Do you “put the internet into” things? Emma says you “wire things for the internet.” I think most likely neither is correct.) He uses it for school. I think he’s happy here. He pointed out things in all the different rooms that he liked—andthere were a lot of different rooms. A big library with gold rugs, a games room with a pool table (only they call it something else), an inground swimming pool, a bunch of offices, a music room, a sewing room… They probably have a room just for licking stamps and putting them on envelopes.
I realized this was the most I’d seen of Kit since he left to go live with Tessa and Jem. I fell back to talk to him while Tessa was showing Emma the Portrait Gallery of Carstairs Past. He’s so much taller, almost my height now, and his voice sounds deeper. And I realized he looks older just like Ty looks older; I’d been thinking of him as the same age he was when I first saw him. But no, he’s growing up. Is grown up, maybe. Almost.
He said he wanted to show me the gardens, so I followed him out through a French door. He led us to an overgrown spot crowded with strawberry bushes, though no strawberries (not the season), and a cracked sundial in the middle. Kit said, without looking at me, that if it made me uncomfortable to be around him, or I didn’t want to see him, he could claim he had a headache and go to bed.
I was thrown. I asked him why I’d mind if he was there. He kicked some dirt around with his boots, and finally said, “Because—because of him.”
I didn’t say anything at first. I was a little frightened to. Kit had seemed fine inside, laughing and joking around and picking up Mina so she could climb on his shoulders. Now he reminded me more of the way he’d been when we first met him, or even the way Markwas when he came back from the Wild Hunt…fragile.
“You mean Ty?” I said.
He nodded sti?y. “You’re his brother,” he said. “I mean, I talk to Dru, and she’s his sister, but—you were always more than just his older brother. You were like his father. I know you raised him. I guess I meant, if you were on his side, I wouldn’t blame you.”
I said, “Ty has never indicated to me there’s a side to be on.”
Kit looked up. “He…hasn’t?”
“I know you two don’t talk anymore,” I said. “I don’t know why. Ty’s never told me why, and I haven’t asked him But he’s never blamed you, or said it was because of anything you’d done. People fight,” I added. “It happens. I wish you were friends again, because when you were, it was something special.” Ty was so happy. But I didn’t say that. “But either way, regardless of anything happening with you and Ty, we all went through so much together. You’ll always be one of us. Family.”
He said in a hoarse voice, “That means a lot.”
We all went and had dinner after that, and a lot of interesting stuff came up. But this letter is getting long, and I mostly wanted to tell you about Kit. I guess I didn’t realize how unhappy he was about the situation with Ty. I wonder if our whole hands-off attitude is working. I mean, I know it’s their business, but what if Ty is unhappy too? Is there something we should be doing?
—Jules
TESSA
Dear Sophie,
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 write:
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. I think of 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—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 they’re having to sort out, although 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 toengage 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 retrieved them and put them in the nursery and let us nap together there.
