He removed his dinner jacket and settled in a comfortable chair, letting the warmth from the fire soften his tight muscles. His eyes wandered the familiar frames that crowded the walls.
A real curator might have found some rude things to say about the art that adorned this house. It was a cluttered collection with no unifying theme, full of pieces that Robin’s parents had simply wanted to own for their value as objects. The best of the lot was in this sitting room: a John Singer Sargent painting of his mother, completed when Robin was still an infant. The famed portraitist had been freshly arrived in London from Paris, and Sir Robert Blyth had leapt at the chance to commission him just as public opinion began to drag Sargent into fashion.
The artist had captured Priscilla, Lady Blyth. The lightly arch look, and the smile, were exactly right. And as for the shadows encroaching on one side of the face, the hand tucked just behind the skirt, unseen—well. Of those few people who saw the true self of Robin’s mother, only Sargent had dared to put it on display like that while she still lived. The painter must have known that neither she nor her husband would catch the irony, neither of them loving art for itself.
Lord Healsmith had been another of the few to see past the Blyths’ sparkling facade. Sir Robert, usually so canny a judge of character, had made an error when calculating exactly how much flattery could be applied to his lordship before it began to ring false. A cold public snubbing had been revenged, over time, by one of Lady Blyth’s most ice-blooded and sweet-mouthed campaigns of social poison, with the result that Lady Healsmith had fled to their Wiltshire estate to escape the glances that followed her in the street.
Robin had heard the way his father laughed when his mother proclaimed her victory.
Healsmith himself had accepted the warning, bottled up his anger, and let it ferment until it was safe to express his dislike. Robin couldn’t entirely blame the man, but he did wish Healsmith had chosen some other form of expressing it. Buying up advertising space on a block of flats, for example, and papering it with a denunciation of the much-lauded Blyths.
But you didn’t speak ill of the dead.
You punished their son, instead.
A soft knock on the door announced Maud, who crossed the room and perched herself on the arm of Robin’s chair. She gnawed on her lower lip before looking Robin in the eye. “I didn’t mean it, about the art.”
“I know,” said Robin.
“But I did mean it about Cambridge.” His sister’s heart-shaped face was uncharacteristically solemn. It was almost, but not quite, the look of their father in his dining-room portrait.
“You always mean it, Maudie,” Robin said. “That’s your charm. But you’ve never mentioned university before.”
“I wasn’t sure before. Now I am. Look here, Robin, I know what you think, but I’ll still mean it next week. Next month.”
Robin made himself consider the idea seriously. It was like trying to balance an egg on its point. “I thought you wanted a court presentation next year.”
“Maybe I want both.”
“Maudie—”
“Oh, the hell with it, Robin,” Maud exploded, “they’re gone,” and then shut her mouth and cast a stricken look at the half-open door.
Robin’s mind filled in the unsaid words: They’re not here to object. To insist that their only daughter follow the steppingstones of the peerage, schoolroom to social season to marriage, and not soil her hands or her mind with the enlarging independence of the middle class.
Never mind that the baronetcy of Thornley Hill was the barest scrape of landed nobility. Nor that the daughter of a baronet who’d stripped his estates to finance his city life was hardly a gem of eligibility.
“I know,” Robin said, feeling his resistance crumble at the lines between her eyes.
“You’ll think about it?”
“I’ll think about it.”
Maud nodded, bent to kiss his cheek in an uncharacteristic display of softness, and left again.
I’ll think about it. It wasn’t a lie. No more than “working at the Home Office” had been a lie. Robin didn’t lie to his sister.
On any other night he’d have cheerfully tried to smother himself with a pillow or recite Greek verbs in order to escape thinking about it, and about what the blazes he was going to do with the house—art and all—and how they were going to afford to pay their active servants, let alone pension off old ones. He had no idea about any of it. It would probably all work out, somehow, but in the meantime every conversation about the future felt like Robin’s brain was being kicked, and he hated it.
Oh, look at yourself, murmured an irrepressible part of Robin. Portrait of a sulky aristocrat in repose. Someone should paint him, indeed: lounging here among his grand belongings, drink in hand, weighed down by the dreadful woes of having both a well-paying job and a baronetcy.
He let out a soft chuckle at the absurdity of it and ran a hand over his face, then found himself rubbing the base of his port glass restlessly up and down his arm, over the magical tattoo. Or whatever it was. The entire attack had taken on the form of a photograph in his mind: vividly captured, but bled dry of colour. When Robin fumbled after the memory of his own fear, it was elusive. The man’s voice was not. He could hear its rough command.
The contract’s there.
Something that doesn’t belong.
Whatever Reggie Gatling had gotten himself involved in, it had closed itself over Robin as well, like a trap springing shut.
As he often did when fretting over something, Robin pulled his lighter from his pocket and turned it in his hand. He wasn’t tempted to go in search of cigarettes. Half the time he forgot the thing had a useful purpose. It was just a squared lump of gold, a comfort when he ran his thumb over the engraved R on its surface.
It was unpleasantly warm in the sitting room. Robin felt flushed, and small sparks of light danced at the edge of his vision; he tucked the lighter away, then loosened his collar and unbuttoned his waistcoat, but it didn’t settle. His next sip of port had an odd peppery edge to it and seemed to tingle at the edges of his tongue long after he swallowed.
Time stretched like rubber. Robin leaned forward in the chair, and frowned. And then— It was not like looking at a book, or a canvas, or even like sitting in the front row of the theatre so that the performance stretched to the very edge of your gaze. There was no sense of having a gaze. Or eyes, or any kind of body. There was just the image.
An enormous terraced garden at night, alight with lanterns and alive with a heady profusion of flowers. The skies above had the gentle murkiness of clouds, fading out from the glow of a hidden moon. Statues dotted stone balconies and silhouetted themselves against that glow. A large golden pheasant with a coloured riot of a tail scuttled across manicured lawns and disappeared beneath the shadows of a bush.
The image changed. A cave of some kind, dimly lit. A blond woman in a beaded dress the colour of strawberry fool was crying, her hair tumbling in disarray around her face, her hands moving through the cradling motions of a spell even as tears spilled down her cheeks.
Change. An interior view, up through a ceiling made of clear glass set in intricate shapes within a lead frame, like a huge stained glass window had been bleached of all hue and wedged here on its side. Shoes and shapes of people moved across the glass, busy as the King’s Cross main platform.
Change. A man sprawled across a bed, pale enough that the veins shone bluish through his bare skin, fair hair sticking to a sweat-slick brow and mouth forming unheard words or sounds of pleasure. He slurred one hand across his own face and grabbed vainly at a handful of sheets with the other. His back arched, lifting his chest. His eyes opened and his features cohered.
Edwin Courcey.