“Why do you do this?” Blyth asked, abruptly. “The—liaison thing?”
It wasn’t difficult to follow his reasoning. Edwin’s family had money. Edwin had money, even if he lacked the precise vowels of someone who hadn’t needed to rely on a scholarship to get to Oxford. Edwin was not, to even the dimmest observer, a man delighted by his post of employment.
“I was asked to do it. The Chief Minister’s a friend of my father’s.” And when Edwin had tried, uncharacteristically, to dig in his heels and refuse, Clifford Courcey had made it a condition of his youngest child’s allowance. Edwin keenly remembered the humiliation of that discussion. The implication that Edwin was never going to be good for anything else. “It’s not strenuous. I’ve plenty of time for my research.” Edwin lobbed the question back across the net. “Why are you doing this?”
Blyth shrugged. “I scraped my Second at Cambridge by the skin of my teeth, and probably scraped my way through the civil service exam even more narrowly. I was never going to get put on anything grand. I did spend a few years as a junior in Gladstone’s office. But—look, Lord Healsmith hated my parents. He was looking for a way to take it out on me, and he had the chance to shove me into a job that looked like a dead end.”
“But you’re titled,” said Edwin. “I wouldn’t have thought . . .”
“Baronet,” said Blyth, which Edwin had already guessed; the man was hardly old enough to have nabbed himself a knighthood. Blyth looked glum about it. “Only inherited a month ago.”
“I’m—sorry.”
Another shrug.
Edwin gave up on politeness. “Why are you bothering with this sort of employment at all? Why aren’t you off administering a country seat, or whatever it is that baronets do?”
A pause. “Idealism?”
“Civil servants don’t get to choose their masters. It’s Asquith and the Liberals now; it could be someone else in another few years.”
Blyth’s mouth twitched. He didn’t look offended. “You don’t think it’s possible to want to serve your country?”
“Would you do it if you weren’t paid to do it?” Edwin countered.
It was the wrong thing to say. The hints of humour vanished.
“No,” Blyth said, and looked out the window.
Edwin put the pieces together. A few years directly under the Home Secretary; that sounded about right, for landed gentry of mediocre intelligence, despite the so-called egalitarianism of the entrance exam. And now Blyth had been shoved into a job that did, from the outside, have all the trappings of demotion. But he’d turned up anyway. Because he was being paid.
Edwin turned the picture in his mind a few times and then set it firmly aside.
He cleared his throat. A peace offering. He was woefully out of practice at making friendly overtures, but he could scrape together some small talk. “And your family, are—”
Between one word and the next, Blyth made a low, strangled noise and doubled over where he sat, his body clenching around his right forearm.
“Blyth.” Edwin lunged across the compartment, stumbled over his own feet, and half fell onto the floor with a curse. His cheeks burned, though Blyth hadn’t noticed. Blyth might not have noticed if the train had left the tracks and hurtled onto its side. “Blyth,” Edwin said again, laying a hand on the man’s knee in order to haul himself up and sit next to him.
Blyth’s whole body was shivering at a frequency finer than the vibration of the train carriage. Edwin snatched his hand back as Blyth, with what looked like real effort, uncurled his body and lifted his head. His chest rose and fell and his breath rasped through parted lips. He looked as though he was trying to drive the thumb of his left hand through his forearm. Then, as suddenly as he’d tensed, he slumped on the seat with a long, loud inhalation.
“The damned—damn,” Blyth said.
“How many times has it happened since the park?” Edwin demanded.
“Just once, two days ago,” Blyth said. “Lasted longer this time.”
Two days ago. Wednesday. Hopefully not while Blyth was reporting to Asquith; that would have made an impression.
“A longer attack fits with what Hawthorn said about replication,” Edwin said, reluctant. Worsening. Damned damn indeed. He should have dragged Blyth to Penhallick the day after it was laid. Who knew how quickly it would progress? “You should have told me it had happened again.”
Blyth gave him an exceedingly stubborn look. God save Edwin from the idiotic flower of English manhood. “I’ve had worse in the boxing ring. And a cricket ball knocked my finger out of joint, my second year at Cambridge. That was no picnic either.” He waggled the finger in question: browned, blunt, and strong.