“Well,” Preston said, “that’s going to make this a lot more difficult.”
And then he knelt in front of her, and Effy was so shocked that she nearly did topple over. She had to put her hand on the desk to steady herself.
“What are you doing?” she choked out.
“If you don’t wipe away the dirt, your cuts will get infected. Infections can lead to blood poisoning, which, if it remains untreated, will eventually necessitate amputation. And in a way, it would be all my fault if you had to have your legs amputated at the knee, because I was the one who asked you to get the blueprints in the first place.”
He said all this with complete sincerity.
Effy took a breath—partly to steel herself, and partly so she wouldn’t laugh at him. True to his word, Preston began delicately picking the pebbles from her wounded knees. His touch was so gentle, she felt only the faintest nips of pain. His eyes were narrowed behind his glasses, as focused as he’d looked when poring over one of Myrddin’s books.
After a while he seemed satisfied that he had gotten out all the pebbles, and he reached up for the glass of water on his desk. Effy was still so baffled that she hardly reacted when he wet his shirtsleeve and began to dab at her gouged skin. That, finally, elicited a gasp from her.
“Ouch,” she whined. “That really stings.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Almost done.”
The pain was making her woozy again. Gingerly, she let her other hand rest on Preston’s shoulder for balance.
He paused in his ministrations, muscles tensing, and looked up at her. They locked eyes for several moments, but neither of them said a word. After another beat, Preston looked down again, returning to his work.
Effy curled her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. His skin, underneath, was warm, and she could feel his muscles flexing. “How many skinned knees have you treated in your career as an academic?”
“I have to say you’re my first.”
She laughed, almost in spite of herself. “You’re very strange, Preston Héloury.”
“You’re the one who jumped out of a moving car, Effy Sayre.”
“It’s only because I wasn’t wearing my seat belt,” she replied.
It was the second time she’d heard him laugh, and Effy remembered how much she liked the sound of it: low and breathy, his shoulder shaking just slightly under her grip.
In another moment, Preston got to his feet and said, “Let me see your hands.”
Effy held them out. Her palms were scratched but not badly. It looked like she’d tussled with a rosebush. With her fingers splayed like that, the absence of her ring finger seemed glaringly obvious.
She hoped Preston wouldn’t ask about it. That was another question she didn’t want to answer.
“They look all right,” Preston conceded. “I’m confident this will not be what does you in.”
He had a little smear of her blood on his cheek where he’d raised his red-stained hand to adjust his glasses. Effy decided not to tell him.
“That’s a relief,” she said. “I would hate for you to be responsible for my untimely demise.”
Preston laughed again. “I’d never overcome the guilt.”
Effy smiled, but she could not stop thinking of the look in Ianto’s eyes, the change in the tenor of his voice. Could she have imagined it all? Why had he hurried her out of the house, only to hurry her back again? He had driven so fast, with such determination, his words all snarled and low. Her brain had pulsed like a lighthouse beacon, every beat of her heart screaming, Danger. Danger. Danger.
She remembered how Ianto had told the story of the Drowning: how the inhabitants of the Bottom Hundred hadn’t realized they were going to die until they were neck-deep in the water. If she hadn’t flung herself out of the car, would she have drowned there?
Sometimes Effy had nightmares where she was sitting in Master Corbenic’s green office chair, her wrists strapped to the armrests, black, murky water rising around her. She couldn’t escape, and the water kept coming in—and worst of all, in those dreams, she didn’t even struggle. She just gulped down the water as if it were air.
“Do you think he’ll be angry at me?” Effy blurted out. “Ianto, I mean.”
The amusement in Preston’s eyes vanished. “Well . . . it’s not the most tactful way to escape an awkward conversation, I’ll give him that. What did he say to you?”
She drew in a breath. Where would she even begin with explaining it all? She certainly could not tell him about the Fairy King. Preston had been clear enough on how he felt about Southern superstition. Confessing to any of it would reveal her as precisely the sort of unstable, untrustworthy girl Effy was so desperate not to be.
“It was just an awkward conversation, like you said,” she replied at last. “I overreacted.”
“I’m sure he’ll get over it,” Preston said. But his expression was uneasy.
Now that Preston was satisfied that Effy would not perish of her injuries, and now that Effy’s headache had begun to recede and her eyes had cleared, they unfurled the blueprints on the desk. By then it had grown dark, and only a pale trickle of starlight bled through the window. The moon was pearl white and not quite full, cobwebbed with lacy clouds.
Preston lit two kerosene lamps and brought them over so they could read by their orange glow.
The blueprints were very old. Effy could tell because they were actually blue. A decade or so ago, traditional blueprints had become obsolete, replaced by less expensive printing methods that rendered blue ink on a white background. The blueprints for Hiraeth Manor were the bright sapphire color of her mother’s favorite brand of gin. The edges were ragged and much of the ink was smudged and faded.
The first page showed a cross section of the house—far, far better than anything Effy could have dreamed of drawing—and the second showed a floor plan.
Preston squinted. “I can’t make sense of any of this.”
“I can.” Effy was pleased that for once she knew something he didn’t.
She drew her thumb down the page, tracing the outline of the first floor. There was the dining room, the kitchen, the foyer, and the horrifying bathroom she had not even been permitted to lay eyes on. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But when she looked for the door to the basement, she found nothing.
“Interesting,” she murmured.
“What?”
“It doesn’t look like the basement is in the blueprints at all,” she said. “But, well, a basement isn’t exactly something you can tack on at the last minute. It has to be part of the architectural plans from the very start. The only thing I can think is maybe this house was built on a previously existing foundation, one that already had a basement.”
Preston’s jaw twitched. “You mean there used to be another structure here, before Hiraeth? It’s hard to imagine how that’s possible. Even this house seems to defy the laws of nature.”
“It wouldn’t be so strange. The Bay of Nine Bells was ravaged by the Drowning, but that doesn’t mean nothing survived.” Effy looked down at the blueprints again, feeling certain of her theory. “It’s easier to repair an existing foundation than to build something entirely new.”
“You’re the expert, I suppose,” Preston said, though he sounded unconvinced.
It was curious, but it didn’t solve any of their problems, since Preston had point-blank refused to go anywhere near the basement, and his face had turned pale at even the mention of it. Effy scanned the drawing of the second floor. There was the study, and the door out to the crumbling balcony, and then the series of rooms Ianto had forbidden her from seeing: his and his mother’s bedchambers. The larger one had to be the master, and then on the left, Ianto’s.
As was always the case when she came up, Myrddin’s widow caught in Effy’s mind like the prick of a needle.
“You’ve never met the mistress of the house, right?” she asked.