“At the end she what?” Tessa said, exasperated. “Really, Jessamine, if you truly have something important to tell us, we could do without the theatrical pauses.”

“At the end she destroyed him,” Jessamine said, and a shudder ran through her silvery form.

Tessa stared at Jessamine as though she wasn’t sure how to respond.

“That doesn’t sound like Lucie,” Will said, but a terrible prickly feeling was coming over him. He wanted to believe Jessamine was mistaken, or even lying, but what reason would she have? He’d never known her to be the kind of ghost that played pranks or made mischief. Of course, she was no help around the place either, but that didn’t mean she’d tell falsehoods about Lucie.

“On the other hand,” said Tessa, “she certainly concealed the fact of her friendship with Jesse’s ghost all this time. She’s entering a rather secretive age, I think.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Will said, then turned to Jessamine. “Where is she now?”

“Holed up in the Sanctuary,” Jessamine said. “I couldn’t follow her. I daresay it’s an oversight that no one has removed ghosts from the list of supernatural creatures forbidden to enter.”

“We can discuss that later,” Will said. If Jessamine truly was concerned for Lucie, that concern didn’t seem to stop her from registering her usual complaints.

Jessamine vanished with an outraged sniff.

“It’s so hard to take her seriously sometimes,” Tessa said, frowning. “Do you think there’s any truth to what she’s saying?”

“Perhaps a kernel of it, but you know as well as I do that Jessamine loves to exaggerate,” Will said, reaching for a jacket. “I’ll just go talk to Lucie and be back before you know it.”

29 A BROKEN MIRROR

And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:

Even as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies; and makes

A thousand images of one that was,

The same, and still the more, the more it breaks;

And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,

Living in shatter’d guise, and still, and cold,

And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,

Yet withers on till all without is old,

Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Cordelia ran.

She ran through Mayfair, along the wide streets, among the rich and wealthy houses with warm golden light spilling from their windows. She hadn’t bothered to glamour herself, and the few passersby on the streets stared openly at the running girl with no coat. Not that she cared.