“I am, if I may be frank, in debt. Cirenworth, you see, was an investment in my legacy. It was far too expensive, but I thought, quite reasonably at the time, that given my history I would soon be promoted within the Clave.” Elias leaned against the piano. “Alas, I have been passed over for promotion multiple times, and due to my recent troubles, I have no longer been drawing a salary at all. I do not wish to rob my children or my wife to pay down my debts. Surely you can see that.”

Surely you can see that. And James could, though he could see just as clearly that Elias wasn’t telling him the full truth. He made a noncommittal noise.

Elias cleared his throat. “Let me come to the point, James—we are family now, and I need your help.”

James inclined his head. “What kind of help?”

“Five thousand pounds,” Elias announced in a tone he might have used to call the winner of a horse race. “That is the sum that would set me right again. You can manage that much, surely—you’ll barely miss it.”

“Five thousand?” James couldn’t keep the shock from his voice. He knew no one who would not have struggled to produce such a sum. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Perhaps you don’t,” said Elias, though he didn’t sound as if he believed it. “Perhaps you might speak to your parents? Surely they could sell something, help me in my time of need.”

Elias was drunker than James had realized. Unlike Matthew, he did not hide his liquor well; it made him both more ebullient and more unreasonable. Maybe time, and the consequences of Elias’s poor decisions, had weakened him—a thought that worried James greatly, not on his father-in-law’s behalf, but on Matthew’s.

“I cannot help you, Elias,” James said, more forcefully than he intended.

“Ah,” Elias said, fixing his bleary gaze on James. “Can’t, or won’t?”

“Both. It’s wrong of you to come to me in this way. It will only poison your relationship with Daisy—”

“Do not use my daughter as an excuse, Herondale.” Elias slammed his hand down on the piano lid. “You have everything, I have nothing; surely you can give me this—” With a visible effort, he forced his voice to be steady. “There are those in the Enclave who do not believe your mother belongs among the Nephilim,” he said, and now there was a different look on his face—a sort of drunken cunning. “Or that you and your sister do either. I could put a word in the Inquisitor’s ear, you know—if I failed to give my approval, it’s unlikely they would allow your sister’s parabatai ceremony with my daughter to go forward—”