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 a teenager, and he had his own life before he came to us, and as a result he often keeps things to himself. And so I worry about him, as one does with teenagers. 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, a sadness he won’t, or can’t, speak about. Maybe it is only that he’s faced so much loss so young, but I can’t help 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 might imagine—but it is late, and I can write about Kit anytime. Let me tell you instead about Julian and Emma’s visit.
The two of them are pulling at the knots of a few mysteries regarding Blackthorn Hall, a curse on the house dating back to, guess who, Benedict Lightwood (I know, Sophie, who could have guessed). And a ghost, benign, faint, and unidentified, probably trapped by the curse. There are six objects, it seems, connected to maintaining the curse, and the ghost told them to bring one here to Cirenworth, hence their visit, though as I say, I don’t think they minded an excuse to see Kit and 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 tarnished, silver-plated whisky flask and a dagger, also quite banged up by time. Neither meant much to me at first—as you 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 Jem does things like this precisely so people will goggle at him; he only pretends to be perfectlydramatic without effort.) “You know it?” said Julian, while at the same time Emma said, “You read Farsi?”
“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 or Alastair were even born. Julian started to say it didn’t make sense to them either—but he was interrupted by 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 fascinating topic unto himself, Sophie, but he will have to wait for another day.) They—I mean Shadowhunters in general, not only 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 a Ghost Sensor 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 the 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 andI did. “The problem,” she said, “is that my Spanish is terrible.”
Julian 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 helped her.
“Do we need it translated?” Julian said. “Is it the physical journal that is important or what’s written inside? The flask was only a flask as far as we know, right?”
Jem was shaking his head. 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 come from the same era. Their owners were almost the same age. And they were all friends.”
I could see all of them in my mind, then—Thomas, Matthew, Alastair, but also Christopher and Anna, and Ariadne, and Cordelia, and my own James and Lucie. It was all so long ago, but I can 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. 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. Her father told her about the curse and the objects.”
I think Emma saw the expression on 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, but he suddenly turned to the objects on the table. “She updated 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.”
