Edwin looked into the fire and let his mother card her frail and swollen fingers through his hair, and told her the uneasy story of Robin Blyth, baronet and civil servant, new to magic and already marked by it in baffling circumstances. It felt better to have told someone. It felt right, normal, for it to just be the two of them, Edwin and his mother, holding things close against the world.
“Poor boy,” she said. “And what a bother for you! You could hardly do otherwise, of course. Best to have this dealt with. I suppose you’ll give him lethe-mint, when it’s sorted out?”
“Of course,” said Edwin.
“It may take more than the mint, if it’s been a week. I’m sure you know what’s best, my dear. And you can always ask Charles to do the spell itself.”
Edwin breathed in. Out. “Of course,” he said again.
He would happily have fallen asleep there, but he had a guest. He bid his mother good night and let himself out. Robin was inspecting the coloured panes of the closest window, darkened though it was by night. Edwin would suffer through a conversation about Tiffany glass if necessary.
But then Robin turned and Edwin saw the question hovering on the man’s lips.
Edwin said, “It’s a form of rheumatism. It gives her pain, and it saps at her strength.” Broad; inarguable. That was as much as a stranger needed to know. The fits of melancholy had been mild, by all accounts, before the rheumatism got its claws into her. Now there were weeks when she refused to change from her nightgown, or to have the curtains drawn, or to raise her voice to dictate a letter. Edwin had done the imbuement on her pens himself. They were sensitive to even a whisper.
Edwin wrote to her more often, not less, when the gaps between her letters yawned wide. It never seemed to drag her out of it more quickly. He wrote nonetheless.
They had just turned into the south corridor when Blyth halted and swayed on his feet, eyes wide. He did not clutch at his arm, or curl around it as he had in the train and as Edwin had half feared he would during dinner. Instead he simply stood, slumped against the wall and staring at nothing, the colour gone from his face just as it had done in Hawthorn’s house. He was breathing, but shallowly. Edwin felt, for a long few heartbeats of startling terror, entirely useless.
And then it was over, whatever it was. Robin blinked and was behind his own eyes again.
Edwin guided them both down the corridor and into the closest of the willow rooms, which was Robin’s. The guidelight still shone motionless outside the door as though set in a bracket.
“All right,” said Edwin when the door closed. He was fed up and worried in equal measure. “Tell me what’s going on. Should I send for a doctor?”
Robin sat on the edge of the bed. “No. I’m not ill. At least, not in the normal sense.”
“Do you have fits?” Edwin demanded, not bothering with delicacy. “Do you hear voices? Whatever it is, I’m hardly about to have you kicked out of my family’s house in the middle of the night. Tell me.”
Robin’s voice shook. “I see things. Not just see—I’m plunged into them, I suppose. It feels like being transported somewhere else, in a rather horrid way. It started the night I was attacked.”
“What sort of things?” Edwin asked, sharp. He was already trying to cross-reference immersive visions with any kind of curse he’d ever read about, and failing.
“This time it was a hedge maze,” said Robin. “Large. Well-trimmed. The kind of thing you can find on the grounds of houses all over the country, I dare say. I saw the maze, and the sky, and—something moving, just on the edge of it all.”
“This time. The others were different?”
“Yes. Different each time.” Colour washed Robin’s cheeks. “All just brief glimpses of places, or people. And no, I don’t hear voices. There’s never any sound.”
“Tell me what you’ve seen.”
Robin’s voice gained an edge. “I’ll paint them for you, if you insist, but perhaps it can wait until tomorrow?”
“You should have told me about this,” Edwin snapped. “A curse that makes you have visions—that’s a detail. That could be vital. How am I supposed to learn how to counteract it when you’re withholding information?”
Robin glared at him. “No matter how many times we call one another by friendly names, Edwin, I don’t know you. I didn’t know if I could trust you. I still don’t.”
Edwin stared back. “You . . . came here.” Hardly eloquent, but Robin seemed to take his meaning.
“Yes. I am here, aren’t I? In a house full of strangers who can do magic, when the last magical strangers I met put this on me.”
That was a fair point. Edwin was momentarily startled at the fear crowding in Robin’s eyes, behind the anger; then he was startled that this was the first time he’d seen it. Stubborn sportsman Robin Blyth. Physical courage he clearly had in handfuls, but this was something else. Edwin swallowed a wash of guilt and climbed to his feet, feeling his own fatigue seep through him as he did so.
“Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll start my research in the morning.”
Robin nodded, shoulders slumping. He rolled his head on his neck where he sat, eyes falling closed, elbows resting on solid spread thighs. A few strands of hair rebelled against their slick styling and fell over his forehead.
Edwin bit the inside of his own mouth and turned away. He could allow himself these slips as long as they stayed firmly inside his own head. Tomorrow he would do what he always did with problems: he would hurl himself at books and interrogate them until they rendered up the solution. He would work this all out; he would let Robin wake up from this bad dream. And then Edwin’s life, too, would settle back to normal.
The breakfast room contained the smells of buttered toast and sausages. It also contained Trudie Davenport and Charlie Walcott, Trudie spooning sugar into tea while Charlie talked and stroked his moustache simultaneously. They both looked up when Robin entered.
“Sir Robin!” said Charlie heartily. “Slept well, I hope?”
As cold-plunge informality went, Robin reflected, that was a middle ground he could live with.
“Very well,” he said. “Good morning, Miss Davenport.”
She flicked a look at him that was flirtatious in an impersonal way, a pole thrust out to test the depth of a puddle. “Trudie. I insist.”
Her teaspoon stirred the cup with a rattling clink, and without any help from her. Belinda’s Cupid game had been a spectacular introduction, but not, it seemed, characteristic. Most of the magic here was smaller, more offhand, completely enmeshed in the lives of the people.
And all of it hidden. There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of country houses and townhouses where the magic was like this, kept inside walls or within the bounds of the estate, just another secret moving like a minnow beneath the surface of society and flashing a fin only where necessary. National interest. Briefings to the PM, like the one Robin had done earlier that week, where Asquith—with his long nose and hooded eyes—had looked as though nothing had ever surprised him, nor ever could.
And yet there was a word for magic’s revelation to the unenlightened. As though one were Saul on the road to Damascus.
Robin piled up a plate of food from the covered silver dishes at the sideboard. He ate at a faster pace than his digestion usually agreed with, and nodded along as he was informed that Mr. Courcey and Walter had already left in order to catch the first train back to London, and that the other members of the party were yet to show their faces.
“Aside from Win,” said Trudie. “The servants were already taking tea into the library when I came downstairs.”
“Some people don’t feel social at breakfast,” said Robin.
“Some people were born without a social bone in their body,” said Trudie.