“I wrote to you,” he said. “I told you we weren’t coming this summer.”

“Mama found the letter,” she said. “First she hid it from me. I thought you had forgotten—at last I found it in her room. She was dreadfully angry. I told her again we only had a friendship, but—” She shook her head. James was conscious that everyone in the room was staring at them. Even Anna was looking at them curiously through the cheroot smoke that wreathed her like mist off the Thames. “She wouldn’t say what was in it, she just smiled as the days went by and you didn’t come. And I was so frightened. When we are not together, when we are not with one another, the bond between us weakens. I feel it. Don’t you?”

He shook his head. “Love must be able to survive distance,” he said, as gently as he could.

“You don’t understand, James. You have a life here in London, and friends, and I have nothing.” Her voice shook with the strength of her feeling.

“Grace. Don’t say that.” But he thought of the overgrown house full of stopped clocks and rotted food. He had sworn he would help her escape from that.

She slid her hand down his arm. He felt her fingers circle his wrist, below the silver bracelet. Loyalty Binds Me. “I should have trusted you would have written to me,” she whispered. “That you thought of me. I thought about you each night.”

Each night. He knew she meant it innocently, but he felt himself tense. It had been so long since he had last kissed her. He could not remember what it had been like, not exactly, but he knew it had shattered him. “I think of you every day,” he said. “And now that you are here…”

“I never thought it would happen. I never thought I would see London,” she said. “The streets, the carriages, the buildings, it’s all so wonderful. The people…” She looked around the room. There was a look in her eyes, avid, almost hungry. “I cannot wait to know them all.”

“There is an outing tomorrow,” James said. “A group going to Regent’s Park. Would your mother allow you to come?”

Grace’s eyes gleamed. “I think she will,” she said. “She had said she wants me to meet people here in London, and oh—I should like to know your parabatai, Matthew. And Thomas and Christopher that you’ve spoken so much of. I—I should like your friends to like me.”

“Of course,” he murmured, and drew her closer against him. She was light and slim, not nearly as soft and warm as Daisy—

Daisy. Raziel, he’d been dancing with Daisy just a few minutes ago. He couldn’t remember excusing himself. Couldn’t remember leaving her.