“Edwin,” he said. “What did Belinda mean, kinder than the alternative?”
Edwin’s face set into the coolness that meant he was trying not to react, or was worried about someone else’s reaction.
Robin said, “Don’t lie to me. Please.”
“Lethe-mint.” Edwin swallowed. “That’s what would have been in the lemonade. It’s what Charlie and Bel drank after they set the traps in the lake, so that they could play the game. So that they wouldn’t remember where any of it was.”
“And giving it to Maud was another of their games.”
A long pause. “Not really,” said Edwin. “It’s what ends up being used, most often, after an accidental unbusheling. There’s a time limit on lethe-mint’s use. After a while, the only option is casting a spell directly on the mind, and those can be—difficult. Or else letting the person keep the memory but binding their tongue to protect it. Lethe-mint is the kindest option.”
Robin was surprised at how personal his anger felt, how close to betrayal. He’d tear apart anyone who harmed his sister, of course he would, but the fact that it was Edwin defending Belinda’s actions . . . that hurt. For the past week it had been the two of them against the world. And now it was clearly Edwin’s world against Robin’s.
“So they were going to just—take her memory of all this? Let her think, what, she’d been drugged?”
“Tell her she’d been offered Champagne and drank too much of it,” said Edwin.
“And you’d be perfectly fine with that?”
“I stopped them,” Edwin snapped. “As you’ll recall.”
Robin forced himself to breathe. Some of the steam left his head. He rubbed at his face. “Yes.” He managed an ungracious “Thank you.”
“Talk to your sister,” said Edwin. “I’ll talk to mine.”
Robin had no idea, even when he opened the door to the sight of Maud sitting in the room’s single upholstered chair, how he was going to start said talk.
Then he tasted pepper, and realised the decision had been made for him in a spectacularly inconvenient fashion.
“Oh, blast,” he said weakly. He managed to stagger in the direction of the bed and—possibly—even sit down on its edge, although the vision swooped in and claimed him before he could register the sensation of sitting.
The young woman was tall, with blond hair tucked up in a fashionable nest of a hairstyle, and she wore a dark skirt with a high-collared white shirtwaist peeping from beneath a dark-red riding jacket. She held her skirts in one hand and slowly climbed a few stairs to a landing, her gloved hand trailing against the wooden panels of the wall.
She turned on the spot. She began to cradle a spell, laughing and directing a warm flash of smile at someone. Green light glowed at her fingertips with equal warmth, and then she spoke.
It was as though she summoned the pain with her silent voice. It seemed to come up from the depths, rising and rising until the vision wavered and plunged into blackness, Robin no longer a set of disembodied eyes but instead disembodied agony, perhaps a pair of lungs—perhaps a distant throat, choking. Mostly, the pain. The hot wires sinking through him again and again, slicing his flesh into burned shreds.
It ended.
Slowly, the rest of Robin’s body faded into awareness. He was panting. He opened his eyes. He was lying on the bed, on his side, his sister’s hand tight on his shoulder and her terrified face close to his.
“I’m all right, Maudie,” he said at once. He winced at the scratch in his voice. “It’s passed now.”
“What’s passed?”
Robin sat up, slow. His arms shook.
“Robin,” Maud said, looking scared and small and his, on his side; they were always on the same side. Robin couldn’t deny her anything, he’d never been able to, and he knew what she was going to say and what his answer would be. “Robin, please tell me what’s going on.”
If he’d known any of this would happen, Edwin thought, he would have turned and walked right out of the Office of Special Domestic Affairs and Complaints as soon as he saw someone that wasn’t Reggie sitting behind the desk. He could have saved himself a lot of bother.
He certainly wouldn’t be standing here having an honest-to-goodness argument with his sister and her husband. They were both giving him a surprised look, as though at a pigeon that had suddenly begun a tap-dancing routine in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Edwin finally managed to get them to agree that they wouldn’t do anything to Maud, anything, while Robin was here, and that Robin needed to stay until they’d sorted out the curse.
Edwin swore full personal responsibility for the Blyths and their memories. Bel had never much cared for responsibility; she all but dusted off her hands, and resurrected her smile.
“I know you don’t spend much time with the family, Win,” she said in parting. “I suppose it’s easier for you, all things considered, to live like one of them”—she waved her hand—“but do remember, won’t you, that you’re one of us?”
“Yes, Bel,” said Edwin.
He wanted to shout that she knew nothing about his life, nothing about what he found easy and what was difficult. But Charlie was frowning and nodding behind her shoulder, and Edwin was not, in the end, at all brave. It wouldn’t have mattered even if he had yelled. Bel and Charlie had always had that perfect immunity, like a waterproofing charm cast at birth. Criticism slid off.
It was only when they wandered away, arm in arm, that Edwin realised they hadn’t asked him why he and Robin ended up staying the extra night at Sutton Cottage. Why Edwin’s face and arms now itched with shallow scabs.
Edwin had never really convinced himself that Charlie and Bel could be involved in this entire business of murder and contracts and curses and secrets. Now he rather thought it was impossible. If they knew what had happened, surely they’d at least bother with the pretence that they didn’t.
They didn’t know. And it simply didn’t occur to them to care.
Even so: Edwin wasn’t about to drop his guard entirely at Penhallick. Miggsy had more than enough nastiness running through him to be dangerous, Billy seemed easily led by stronger personalities, and Edwin didn’t think he’d ever seen a true emotion of Trudie Davenport’s. She performed as she breathed. She could be hiding almost anything.
He went to his mother’s rooms next, but her maid Annie told him she’d just fallen asleep and that she’d barely caught a wink the previous night. Edwin promised to return later, and let his feet take him to the library. He recognised that he was hiding. The last few days had represented the most time he’d spent constantly in the company of another person in years. Robin was surprisingly easy to be around, but even so, part of Edwin felt like the Gatlings’ oak-heart clock: run-down, out of power. Needing refreshment to be any good at all.
And this, the large lavish space with its silence and the soaring shelves of books—each one bearing his own hand’s symbols, his own catalogue painstakingly charmed into them—was the refreshment he needed. The usual itchy Penhallick sensation had been both stronger and less uncomfortable since he returned, like how he imagined it felt to don a pair of reading glasses and see words come into focus when one had been straining after them. He didn’t know what he’d expected. For Penhallick to be jealous, somehow? For it to have disavowed his blood? No—plenty of families had multiple properties.
He’d have to research it. Thoroughly. After all of this was over, of course.