Charlotte started, and sighed. “Jem . . .”
“It’s important, Charlotte.”
Charlotte glanced over at the tin on her desk that held her favorite lemon drops. “After Wil ’s parents came here to see him, when he was twelve, and he sent them away . . . I begged him to speak to them, just for a moment, but he wouldn’t. I tried to make him understand that if they left, then he could never see them again, and I could never tel him news of them. He took my hand, and he said, ‘Please just promise me you’l tel me if they die, Charlotte. Promise me.’” She looked down, her fingers knotting in the material of her dress. “It was such an odd request for a little boy to make.
I—I had to say yes.”
“So you’ve been looking into the welfare of Wil ’s family?” Jem asked.
“I hired Ragnor Fel to do it,” Charlotte said. “For the first three years. The fourth year he came back to me and told me that the Herondales had moved. Edmund Herondale—that’s Wil ’s father—had lost their house gambling. That was al Ragnor was able to glean. The Herondales had been forced to move. He could find no further trace of them.”
“Did you ever tel Wil ?” Tessa said.
“No.” Charlotte shook her head. “He had made me promise to tel him if they died, that was al . Why add to his unhappiness with the knowledge that they had lost their home? He never mentioned them. I had grown to hope he might have forgotten—”
“He has never forgotten.” There was a force in Jem’s words that stopped the nervous movement of Charlotte’s fingers.
“I should not have done it,” Charlotte said. “I should never have made that promise. It was a contravention of the Law—”
“When Wil truly wants something,” said Jem quietly, “when he feels something, he can break your heart.”
There was a silence. Charlotte’s lips were tight, her eyes suspiciously bright. “Did he say anything about where he was going when he left Kings Cross?”
“No,” said Tessa. “We arrived, and he just up and dusted—sorry, got up and ran,” she corrected herself, their blank looks alerting her to the fact that she was using American slang.
“‘Up and dusted,’” said Jem. “I like that. Makes it sound like he left a cloud of dust spinning in his wake. He didn’t say anything, no—just elbowed his way through the crowd and was gone. Nearly knocked down Cyril coming to get us.”
“None of it makes any sense,” Charlotte moaned. “Why on earth would Wil ’s family be living in a house that used to belong to Mortmain? In Yorkshire of al places? This is not where I thought this road would lead. We sought Mortmain and we found the Shades; we sought him again and found Wil ’s family. He encircles us, like that cursed ouroboros that is his symbol.”
“You had Ragnor Fel look into Wil ’s family’s welfare before,” said Jem. “Can you do it again? If Mortmain is somehow entangled with them . . .
for whatever reason . . .”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Charlotte. “I wil write to him immediately.”
“There is a part of this I do not understand,” Tessa said. “The reparations demand was filed in 1825, and the complain-ant’s age was listed as twenty-two. If he was twenty-two then, he’d be seventy-five now, and he doesn’t look that old. Maybe forty . . .”
“There are ways,” Charlotte said slowly, “for mundanes who dabble in dark magic to prolong their lives. Just the sort of spel , by the way, that one might find in the Book of the White. Which is why possession of the Book by anyone other than the Clave is considered a crime.”
“Al that newspaper business about Mortmain inheriting a shipping company from his father,” Jem said. “Do you think he pul ed the vampire trick?”
“The vampire trick?” echoed Tessa, trying in vain to remember such a thing from the Codex.
“It’s a way vampires have of keeping their money over time,” said Charlotte. “When they have been too long in one place, long enough that people have started to notice that they never age, they fake their own death and leave their inheritance to a long-lost son or nephew. Voila—the nephew shows up, bears an uncanny resemblance to his father or uncle, but there he is and he gets the money. And they go on like that for generations sometimes. Mortmain could easily have left the company to himself to disguise the fact that he wasn’t aging.”
“So he pretended to be his own son,” said Tessa. “Which would also have given him a reason to be seen changing the direction of the company —to return to Britain and begin interesting himself in mechanisms, that sort of thing.”
“And is probably also why he left the house in Yorkshire,” said Henry.
“Though that does not explain why it is being inhabited by Wil ’s family,” mused Jem.
“Or where Wil is,” added Tessa.