“I’ll be home tomorrow,” I text him.
He doesn’t reply.
As soon as I open the front door, I can hear the television, and my first thought is that I’m in the wrong house. Then I hear my father shouting, and I’m certain I’m in the wrong house—I’ve never heard him raise his voice.
“I won’t ask you again, Sophronia! Put that down this minute! Sophronia! ”
One of the twins runs past me, holding a doll over her head. I snatch it.
“Basil!” she shouts, grabbing my waist. Sophie and Petra are 5. This is Sophie, I think, but I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to tell the twins apart unless they’re smiling.
I pick her up. “Goodness, you’re all grown up. It’s like holding a baby rhinoceros.”
“Basil,” she grins, “hide me.” Definitely Sophie.
“You are well over the line, Sophronia!” Father yells. （Actually yells. ） I carry Sophie into the family room, where Petra’s sobbing on the sofa. I hand her the doll. I always thought that twins were supposed to be best friends, but these two fight like rats. The baby’s crying, too. My father—or possibly his unhinged doppelg?nger?—is pacing with him. He stops when he sees me. “Basilton?”
“Father?”
Malcolm Grimm has two looks: gentleman farmer and gentleman’s gentleman. This is decidedly neither. His white hair is sticking up, his shirt is untucked. He looks like he’s just been roughed up in an alley—no, I’ve seen my father get roughed up in an alley, and he stayed much more pulled together than this.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“Tip-top,” he says, automatically. “Basil, would you be so kind?” He hands me the baby and takes Sophie. He scoops up Petra, too. “You pair are going to bed. And if you don’t stay there, I’ll—well, I’ll be very disappointed.”
The baby—Swithin’s nearly 2, I should stop calling him “the baby”—is screaming in my ear.
I pat his back, swaying. “What’s wrong, little puff? Bad night?” I check his nappy, then his forehead. “You’re allowed a bad night. Should we sing a song? Your sisters always liked my singing … Even Mordelia.”
I bounce him around the family room, singing songs from the White Album. The whole room is a mess, strewn with toys and clothes. It looks like my father let the girls eat dinner out here—frozen pizza?—and there are two dirty nappies shoved under the coffee table. Is this what happens when my stepmother goes out for the night? Poor Daphne.
Swithin stops crying during “Martha My Dear” and finally falls asleep the second time through “I Will.” I ease myself down onto the sofa, trying not to disturb him.
“Oh, Basilton. Thank magic.” My father’s standing in the doorway, looking a hundred years old. He drops into a leather club chair and groans.
If he had asked me at the time, I would have told him that 46 was too bloody old to start a second family. The man was already past his prime when he had me! But Daphne was young and had baby fever, and he was in love.
That was eight years and four children ago. Magic knows whether Daphne wants to have more; she’s still in her 30s and doesn’t seem to have any other interests.
“Is Daphne at book club?”
Swithin makes a fussy noise, but settles back on my chest when I pat him. I look up at my father to see if he heard me.
He’s starting to cry.
7
SHEPARD
“Hey. Penelope. It’s all right.”
She’s been pacing for an hour. “I know it’s all right,” she snaps.
“Okay, good,” I say. “That’s good. Maybe you could sit down?”
“I don’t feel like sitting down. I feel like pacing. It helps me think. I need a blackboard, why doesn’t this flat have a blackboard!”
Her phone pings. It’s been going off every ten minutes or so since we left her parents’ house.
“Is that your mom again?”
“Yes.” Penelope has paused her pacing to furiously thumb out a reply.
“What are you telling her?”
“Lies.”
“You don’t have to lie to your mother for my sake.”
“I think I do, Shepard, unless you’d like me to magically concuss you and leave you in Piccadilly Circus.”
“I told you—I can just go home.”
“You don’t even have a real passport!”
“Cast a few spells my way, and I’ll get on a plane. It’ll be fine.”