“There,” said the man. “That’ll give you something to mull over while you’re shuffling all that paperwork in your new office. Keep those eyes peeled. Find the last contract. I wager you’ll be a lot more happy to help the next time we come calling.”
Robin emitted the wheezy opinion that every single one of their mothers had conceived them in congress with pox-ridden barnyard beasts. The knowledge that his parents would have been horrified if they’d heard their model firstborn spitting out words he might have licked up from the gutter slightly made up for the parting kick that was delivered to his stomach as the men walked out of the alley.
After a long count of ten, Robin held his ribs and struggled to his feet.
On Robin’s arm, the strange symbols no longer glowed. Instead they were as black as any tattoo. Blacker, in fact, and crisper, than those examples of body art that Robin had seen—mostly on sailors in the street but once, memorably, on a fellow scholar who’d found someone prepared to ink a few lines of Horace into the delectable dip of his lower back.
There was no lingering pain. No redness of the surrounding skin. Just the shapes and almost-letters, stark against Robin’s skin. When he stared too long at them they seemed almost to crawl.
Bowden knocked on the door to Robin’s dressing room, and Robin hastily smoothed the shirtsleeve back down.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear the dinner gong, sir,” said Bowden reproachfully. Bowden had been the late Sir Robert’s valet and was doing his respectful best to encroach upon Robin’s own dressing habits. It was equal parts affection and an understandable anxiety to remain employed, even though Bowden’s hair was as white as Robin’s shirt.
Robin submitted to Bowden’s arthritic fingers fumbling his cuff links and helping him into his dinner jacket, and made a mental note to talk to Gunning about a pension for the man.
Robin sat at the head of the dinner table and hated it. If it were left up to him and Maud then they’d have abandoned the whole thing in favour of an informal supper, but the mouths of the housekeeper and butler formed identical moues of disapproval whenever Robin hazarded the prospect of anything less than a proper family dinner, even when the family in question now numbered only two.
At least they were in the small dining room, cosy with wood and memory, instead of the sparkling cavernous room that had been the scene of the late Sir Robert and Lady Blyth’s social triumphs.
“—the entire pond, ducks and all.” Maud was coming to the end of a story about her friend Eliza’s brother Paul, and some exploit involving a runaway bicycle. “And Paul and his friends are going to the Gaiety tomorrow night, and have promised to tell us all about it,” she added, her voice gaining a provocative edge. “Liza says that Paul is arse-over-nose for a blonde in the chorus line.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Robin, taking a bite from a lamb cutlet.
The somewhat awkward silence was that of Maud realising that there was no point in needling the dinner table with unladylike talk, because Robin wasn’t going to leap in and disapprove. It was an empty reflex now, Robin thought. Ingrained. It was all still too fresh for things like that to be unlearned.
Robin glanced up at the painting of their father that stared in benevolent solemnity down from the wall. Unwanted grief rose like acid in his throat.
“I have an announcement” was Maud’s next sally.
Robin smiled. Maud had approximately three announcements per week. “What is it, Maudie?”
“I want to attend Newnham.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do! I shall die if I don’t!”
“No, you shan’t,” said Robin. “Pass the mint jelly.”
Maud deflated. “I dare say not, but you know what I mean.”
“Why on Earth do you want to go to Cambridge?”
“Why’d you?”
“That’s different and you know it,” said Robin.
Maud lifted her chin and speared a carrot as though it had offended her, an annoyed little shadow in her black crepe-trimmed dress. She’d refused to buy jet jewellery, but hadn’t dared pearls; her neck and ears were defiantly bare. Mourning dress was particularly unfair on eighteen-year-old girls, she’d told Robin. At length.
“Look, ask me again next week,” Robin said.
“You always say that when you’re trying to dodge something.”
“You know what Gunning said yesterday,” said Robin, grasping for a solid excuse. “We haven’t enough money that we can toss it around.”
Martin Gunning was his parents’—now his, although the possessive still felt slippery—primary man of business in London. Robin had guiltily rescheduled until he couldn’t put the man off any further, and had marched into the study to meet with him with the vague feeling of climbing the gallows.
Gunning had stood with frustration painting his face as he reminded Robin about the wills of Sir Robert and Lady Blyth, which were as sparkling and selfless and attention-grabbing as any words they’d uttered in life. They committed the bulk of their liquid assets to various funds and orphanages and projects that would probably do them the favour of immortalising their names—and divided, as an afterthought, the rest between their children. In his more forgiving moments, Robin believed they were the wills of two people in the prime of their life who never honestly thought they could die. They were showpiece documents.
And Robin didn’t even have the luxury of wholehearted resentment, because the irony was that those documents had probably done a lot of good. Orphans and nurses and starving families in the East End wouldn’t care a whit about the character of their deceased benefactors. Charity done out of ruthless self-promotion was still charity.
It only mattered to Robin and Maud that the rest, once the loans had been repaid, fell dismally short of what would be necessary if the two surviving members of the Blyth family were to continue to live as they had always done.
Gunning had uttered a long, stultifying speech about death-duties and how Robin needed to let him take what was left of their family’s capital and invest it sensibly, thinking of the future. Start putting some of it back into the Thornley Hill estate so that eventually it might pull its weight again.
And meanwhile, Robin was still a member of His Majesty’s Civil Service, because his parents’ delightful piece of career whimsy had somehow turned into their family’s most reliable source of income.
From a magical liaison job. Robin stared at a white patch of plate between his creamed spinach and his lamb, and thought of snowflakes, and fog.
“Ten new gowns would be tossing money,” said Maud, steely. “Newnham’s different. The education of women is the promise of the future.”
Robin sighed. “Has that Sinclair girl been dragging you to suffragette rallies again?”
The steely look strengthened; Robin weakened.
“I’ll talk to Gunning again tomorrow,” he said. “There are still plenty of things we can sell.”
“Some of this boring art, to begin with,” said Maud. “And in any case, you’ve got this new job—”
“Working at the Home Office again,” said Robin hastily. “That’s all I’ll tell you about it for now.”
Distracted, Maud turned a look of mingled admiration and hilarity onto him. She clearly thought he’d wrangled himself an intelligence job and was clamming up to protect national secrets. Robin’s grip on his fork faltered with the memory of pain.
Mercifully their talk turned to sport after that, and the investigation into the deadly ballooning accident at the Franco-British Exhibition the previous month, and then the dessert course was done and Robin escaped to the smallest sitting room with a glass of port. He loved his sister, and normally wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of the evening with her. But his thoughts were unspooling and his shoulders were high. He was, he realised, bracing himself constantly for another flare of that hot-wire sensation.