Takes place at the beginning of Chapter Nine of Clockwork
Angel, “The Conclave”
Will
kicked his heels impatiently against the legs of the library table. If
Charlotte were there, she would have told him to stop damaging the furniture,
though half the furniture in the library already bore the marks of years of
abuse—chips in the pillars where he and Jem had been practicing swordplay
outside the training room, scuffed shoe-prints on the windowseats where he’d
sat for hours reading. Books with turned-down pages and broken spines,
fingerprints on the walls.
Of
course if Charlotte were there, they wouldn’t be doing what they were currently
doing, either, which was watching Tessa Change form from herself to Camille and
back again. Jem sat beside Will on the library table, occasionally calling out
encouragement or advice. Will, leaning back on his hands with an apple he had
stolen from the kitchen beside him, was pretending to be barely paying
attention.
But
paying attention he was. Tessa was pacing up and down the room, her hands
clenched at her sides in concentration. It was fascinating to watch her Change:
there was a ripple, as of the smooth water of a pond disturbed by a thrown
pebble, and her dark hair would thread through with blond, her body curving and
changing in such a way that Will found it impossible to pull his eyes away. It
was not usually considered polite to stare at a lady in such a direct way, and
yet he was glad of the chance . . .
He
was, wasn’t he? He blinked his eyes as if meaning to clear his head. Camille
was beautiful—one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. But her beauty
left him cold. It was, as he had said to Jem, like a dead flower pressed under
glass. If his heart was beating hard and his gaze was caught, it was by Tessa
herself. He told himself it was the fascination of such unusual magic, not the
rather adorable scowl that twisted her features when she had difficulty
capturing Camille’s gliding walk—or the way her dress slipped away from her collarbones
and down her shoulder when she turned back into herself, or the way her dark
hair, coming unpinned, clung to her cheeks and neck as she shook her head in
frustration—
He
picked up the apple by his side and began ostentatiously polishing it on his
shirtfront, hoping it would hide the sudden shaking in his hands. Feelings for
Tessa Gray were not acceptable. Feelings for anyone were dangerous, but
feelings for a girl who was actually living in the Institute—someone who had
become an intricate part of their plans, who he could not avoid—were especially
so.
He
knew what he had to do in such a circumstance. Drive her away; hurt her; make
her hate him. And yet everything in him rebelled against the idea. It was
because she was alone, vulnerable, he told himself. It would be such a great
cruelty to do it . . .
She
stopped where she was, throwing her arms up, and making a noise of frustration.
“I simply cannot walk in that manner!” she exclaimed. “The way Camille simply
seems to glide . . .”
“You
point your feet out too much when you walk,” Will said, though it wasn’t
strictly true. It was as cruel as he felt he could be, and Tessa rewarded him
with a sharp look of reproof.. “Camille walks delicately. Like a faun in the
woods. Not like a duck.”
“I
do not walk like a duck.”
“I
like ducks,” Jem said. “Especially the ones in Hyde Park.” He grinned sideways
at Will, and Will knew what he was remembering: he was remembering the same
thing. “Remember when you tried to convince me to feed a poultry pie to the mallards
in the park to see if you could breed a race of cannibal ducks?”
He
felt Jem shake with laughter beside him. What Jem did not know was that Will’s
feelings about ducks—and yes, he knew it was ridiculous to have complicated
feelings about waterfowl, but he could not help it—were caught up with his
memories of his childhood. In Wales, there had been a duck pond in front of the
manor. As a child, Will had often gone out to throw bits of stale bread to the
ducks. It amused him to watch them quacking and fighting over the remains of
his breakfast toast. Or it did, until one of the ducks—a particularly large
mallard—upon realizing that Will had no more bread in his pockets, raced at the
boy and bit him sharply on the finger.
Will
had only been six years old, and had retreated posthaste to the house, where
Ella, already eight and immeasurably superior, had burst out laughing at his
story and then bandaged up his finger. Will would have thought no more about it
had it not been that on the next morning, upon leaving the house through the
kitchen door, meaning to play the back garden, he had been arrested by the
sight of the same black mallard, its beady eyes fixed on him. Before Will could
move, it had darted at him and bitten him viciously on his other hand; by the
time he had an opportunity to yell, the offending bird had vanished into the
shrubbery.
This
time, when Ella bandaged his finger, she said, “What did you do to the poor
creature, Will? I’ve never heard of a duck planning revenge before.”
“Nothing!”
Will protested indignantly. “I just didn’t have any more bread for it, so it
bit me.”
Ella
gave him a doubting look. But that night, before Will went to bed, he drew back
the curtains of his bedroom to look out on the stars—and saw, motionless in the
middle of the courtyard, the small black figure of a duck, eyes fixed on his
bedroom window.
His
yell brought Ella running. Together they stared out the window at the duck,
which appeared ready to remain there all night. Finally, Ella shook her head.
“I shall manage this,” she said, and with a toss of her black braids, she
stalked downstairs.
Through
the window, Will saw her come out of the house. She marched up to the duck and
bent down over it. For a moment, they appeared to be in intense conversation.
After a few minutes, she straightened up, and the duck spun round, and with a
final shake of its tailfeathers, strode out of the courtyard. Ella turned and
came back inside.
When
she returned to Will’s room, he was sitting on the bed and looking up at her with
enormous eyes. “What did you do?”
She
smiled smugly. “We came to an agreement, the duck and I.”
“What
kind of agreement?”
Ella
bent down and, brushing aside his thick black curls, kissed his forehead.
“Nothing you need to worry about, cariad. Go to sleep.”
Will
did, and the duck never bothered him again. For years afterward he would ask
Ella what she had done to get rid of the blasted thing, and she would only
shake with silent laughter and say nothing. When he had fled from his house
after her death, and was halfway to London, he had remembered her kissing him
on the forehead—an unusual gesture for Ella, who was not as openly affectionate
as Cecily, who he could never seen to detach from clinging on to his
sleeves—and the memory had been like a hot knife going into him; he had curled
up around the pain and cried.
Throwing
poultry pies at the ducks in the park had been helpful, oddly; he had thought
Ella, Ella, at first, but Jem’s laughter had blown away some of the pain of the
memory, and he had only thought how glad his sister would have been to have
seen him laughing there in that green space, and how he had once had people who
loved him, and still did now, even if it was only one.
“They
ate it too,” Will said, taking a bite of his apple. He was practiced enough now
that he knew none of what he had been thinking showed on his face.
“Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.”
Tessa
looked at him sideways, and for a single moment, Will had the unnerving feeling
that perhaps she saw through him better than he had imagined. She was Tessa
then; her eyes were gray as the sea, and for a long pause all he could do was
look at her, all else forgotten—apples, vampires, ducks, and everything else in
the world that was not Tessa Gray.
“Ducks,”
Jem muttered beside him, too low for Tessa to hear. “You are mad, you know
that?”
Will
dropped his eyes from Tessa’s. “Oh, I know.”
