Then, just before he kissed her, the French windows to the drawing room opened and Noah walked out.
Noah sent Jack one of those blank, deeply meaningful looks, and asked if she could speak to her daughter alone. Jack’s hands tightened briefly about Grace’s face, then he smiled at her, stepped back, and left.
Once he had gone, Noah took a deep breath, clenched her fists deep inside her coat pockets, and hoped she hadn’t lost her daughter as she was very much afraid she had lost Weyland.
“Grace,” she said, “I have made an utter fool of myself, and I need to apologise to you as much as I do to Weyland.”
Grace made no response, but at least she was looking at her mother, and Noah took some heart from that.
“I have grown too used to having Jack pine for me,” Noah said. “It was a horrible shock to my pride to realise he’d abandoned me to pine after you instead.”
Noah gave a small, wan smile. “And it was a terrible shock to realise that I have been so blind when it came to you.”
“Mother—”
Noah pulled her hands out of her pockets and pulled Grace into an embrace. “I have no call either on Jack or on the Troy Game, whether it be its destruction or its completion. Grace, the world is yours if you want it. Take it, please, with all my love.”
Grace hugged her mother tightly, then leaned back a little. “Ariadne has taught me what she knows, but you could teach me so much more. Will you?”
Noah took a deep breath. “No. Grace, I don’t think I should. I think you and I…” What Noah wanted to say was that she thought there were too many barriers between her and Grace, not the least of them being Jack, and those barriers would make teaching impossible. But she could hardly say that. “I’m too close to you, Grace. Too blind. I should have known Catling had been coming to you, and that the bands never left you, and I didn’t. Ariadne has the clarity of distance.” Noah gave a soft laugh. “She’ll drive you hard, which is what you need, whereas I’d always be watching what I said around you. Grace, I love you dearly for asking, and I didn’t deserve that, but Ariadne would be better for you.”
“And Jack…do you mind?”
“I am worried about my daughter. I would worry whatever man came courting her. And Jack has so much baggage.” Noah let a mischievous smile spread over her face. “But, he’s a great deal better than Brutus. Just don’t let him push you, Grace. Do what you want, not what he wants for you.”
NINE
London
Friday, 20th September to Saturday, 21st September 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
So much had happened over the past week or so that it proved difficult to process it all and put it in calm order. Everything from that strange walk down Lambeth Embankment with Jack, to going to live and train with Ariadne, to discovering that I had four of the kingship bands of Troy buried within my flesh, and, on top of all this, to have Jack tell me that I was apparently his perfect labyrinthine match as well.
I found it difficult to believe that I, who had lived her entire life at the edge of the circle, was now very much in the heart of it.
Most of all I found it difficult to believe that Jack—Brutus-William-Louis-Jack—who had spent the past few thousand years aching for my mother, should now abandon that ache to profess an interest in me.
I don’t think I would have believed it, save for that painful scene at Faerie Hill Manor when my mother said, You can’t want Grace (mirroring my own belief, precisely), and then Jack had replied, I want Grace. It wasn’t just the words, but the expressions on everyone’s faces, as well. There was disbelief, amazement, intrigue and, as eyes slid my way, interest.
None of that had been staged, none of it rehearsed, all of it open, painful, wounding. Jack had told my mother he didn’t want her any more.
That he wanted me.
I spent a great deal of time sitting on my bed in Ariadne’s apartment, just thinking, learning to feel.
I was changing, becoming more confident—learning to live, learning who I was—and that was due almost as much to Ariadne as it was to Jack. Hitherto, I’d spent my life cringing in corners; Ariadne, through her training and the fact that she treated me as an equal, gave me the confidence to dare on my own.
I had never believed that I could ever be anything other than the most mediocre of Mistresses. I had never dared hope that any man might find me as fascinating as my mother. I’d never hoped to be important to anyone (in anything other than a negative way).
What really surprised me was how much I liked this new state of being. People were beginning to see me.
I had feared Jack’s arrival, and while I certainly could not pretend that it hadn’t been painful, in a variety of ways, since his arrival, I had begun to live.
I began, inch by inch, to believe there might be some hope for me. That somehow, Jack might be able to find a way to destroy the Troy Game, and save me in the process.
On Saturday, Jack took me out to dinner. Ariadne took one look at the clothes I had brought with me, sniffed, and produced something from her wardrobe that I might wear. Amazingly, it wasn’t scarlet, and not even too revealing, but a lovely ice-blue dress of some clingy material that I actually felt comfortable wearing —although I knew that a year ago I probably would have cringed at wearing it.
Jack took me to a restaurant in Chelsea.
I had a wonderful time.
We didn’t talk about anything that had been said between us at Lambeth Embankment, or about what had been said at Faerie Hill Manor the day he’d told everyone, my mother included, that I carried the bands within me.
We didn’t even talk about the Troy Game.
Instead, we chatted very much as we had that Christmas when Jack and Harry had kept me company with my pain on the terrace. I discovered I very much liked talking to Jack, and that he found no effort in talking to me. We talked mostly about what he’d done and what he’d seen over his lives. Nothing too demanding—funny, humorous tales, as well as some more reflective ones.
It was partway through the evening when I realised, with a jolt, that Jack wasn’t going to push. He would leave it up to me, whatever I wanted, and all I needed was to ask. I felt a weight lift away from my shoulders and, remarkably, I discovered I was enjoying myself, and that I was quite at ease.
We talked a little of tomorrow, when I would hand four of the bands of Troy to Jack. It was a very brief discussion, merely going over the technicalities of the ritual, but at the end of it Jack asked me if I was afraid.
“No,” I replied, “I’m not scared of you at all.”
That wasn’t what Jack had asked me, but I think it was the answer he was hoping for, because his eyes gleamed with pleasure, and he smiled.
“You’re not scared of yourself any more,” he said, and I realised it was true. I’d spent my lifetime being scared of myself, and of life in general.
I stared at Jack, and took a deep breath in wonder.
That night, as I lay in my bed in Ariadne’s apartment, Catling appeared to me.
The horrid cold-faced malevolence: she stood at the end of the bed and stared.
And then smiled, as if she actually approved of what was happening in my life.
I hated her, and loathed it that she tainted what had otherwise been a wonderful night, but for once I did not rail at her, or beg her to go away.
I rolled over, settled myself comfortably, and went back to sleep.
Part Five
THE ENTWINED BANDS
London, 1670
The skyline of London was very gradually inching upwards after the disaster of the Great Fire four years previously. Houses and warehouses had been the first structures to be rebuilt (beds and business, as always, came first), but now the churches and chapels were also rising, one by one, through the tangle.
Christopher Wren, although primarily responsible for the design and rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral, had designed fifty of these churches as well as myriad private and public secular buildings. He also supervised the work of building about half of these churches and private buildings.
Wren was a busy man.
Still only in his late thirties, Wren worked a staggering eighteen or nineteen hours each day, rising well before dawn to head off to whatever building site commanded his attention that day. He’d taken rooms in Southwark, which meant that every morning, at dawn, he walked across London Bridge heading for his work in London.