“All right,” said Edwin when the door closed. He was fed up and worried in equal measure. “Tell me what’s going on. Should I send for a doctor?”
Robin sat on the edge of the bed. “No. I’m not ill. At least, not in the normal sense.”
“Do you have fits?” Edwin demanded, not bothering with delicacy. “Do you hear voices? Whatever it is, I’m hardly about to have you kicked out of my family’s house in the middle of the night. Tell me.”
Robin’s voice shook. “I see things. Not just see—I’m plunged into them, I suppose. It feels like being transported somewhere else, in a rather horrid way. It started the night I was attacked.”
“What sort of things?” Edwin asked, sharp. He was already trying to cross-reference immersive visions with any kind of curse he’d ever read about, and failing.
“This time it was a hedge maze,” said Robin. “Large. Well-trimmed. The kind of thing you can find on the grounds of houses all over the country, I dare say. I saw the maze, and the sky, and—something moving, just on the edge of it all.”
“This time. The others were different?”
“Yes. Different each time.” Colour washed Robin’s cheeks. “All just brief glimpses of places, or people. And no, I don’t hear voices. There’s never any sound.”
“Tell me what you’ve seen.”
Robin’s voice gained an edge. “I’ll paint them for you, if you insist, but perhaps it can wait until tomorrow?”
“You should have told me about this,” Edwin snapped. “A curse that makes you have visions—that’s a detail. That could be vital. How am I supposed to learn how to counteract it when you’re withholding information?”
Robin glared at him. “No matter how many times we call one another by friendly names, Edwin, I don’t know you. I didn’t know if I could trust you. I still don’t.”
Edwin stared back. “You . . . came here.” Hardly eloquent, but Robin seemed to take his meaning.
“Yes. I am here, aren’t I? In a house full of strangers who can do magic, when the last magical strangers I met put this on me.”
That was a fair point. Edwin was momentarily startled at the fear crowding in Robin’s eyes, behind the anger; then he was startled that this was the first time he’d seen it. Stubborn sportsman Robin Blyth. Physical courage he clearly had in handfuls, but this was something else. Edwin swallowed a wash of guilt and climbed to his feet, feeling his own fatigue seep through him as he did so.
“Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll start my research in the morning.”
Robin nodded, shoulders slumping. He rolled his head on his neck where he sat, eyes falling closed, elbows resting on solid spread thighs. A few strands of hair rebelled against their slick styling and fell over his forehead.
Edwin bit the inside of his own mouth and turned away. He could allow himself these slips as long as they stayed firmly inside his own head. Tomorrow he would do what he always did with problems: he would hurl himself at books and interrogate them until they rendered up the solution. He would work this all out; he would let Robin wake up from this bad dream. And then Edwin’s life, too, would settle back to normal.
The breakfast room contained the smells of buttered toast and sausages. It also contained Trudie Davenport and Charlie Walcott, Trudie spooning sugar into tea while Charlie talked and stroked his moustache simultaneously. They both looked up when Robin entered.
“Sir Robin!” said Charlie heartily. “Slept well, I hope?”
As cold-plunge informality went, Robin reflected, that was a middle ground he could live with.
“Very well,” he said. “Good morning, Miss Davenport.”
She flicked a look at him that was flirtatious in an impersonal way, a pole thrust out to test the depth of a puddle. “Trudie. I insist.”
Her teaspoon stirred the cup with a rattling clink, and without any help from her. Belinda’s Cupid game had been a spectacular introduction, but not, it seemed, characteristic. Most of the magic here was smaller, more offhand, completely enmeshed in the lives of the people.
And all of it hidden. There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of country houses and townhouses where the magic was like this, kept inside walls or within the bounds of the estate, just another secret moving like a minnow beneath the surface of society and flashing a fin only where necessary. National interest. Briefings to the PM, like the one Robin had done earlier that week, where Asquith—with his long nose and hooded eyes—had looked as though nothing had ever surprised him, nor ever could.