And yet there was a word for magic’s revelation to the unenlightened. As though one were Saul on the road to Damascus.
Robin piled up a plate of food from the covered silver dishes at the sideboard. He ate at a faster pace than his digestion usually agreed with, and nodded along as he was informed that Mr. Courcey and Walter had already left in order to catch the first train back to London, and that the other members of the party were yet to show their faces.
“Aside from Win,” said Trudie. “The servants were already taking tea into the library when I came downstairs.”
“Some people don’t feel social at breakfast,” said Robin.
“Some people were born without a social bone in their body,” said Trudie.
It was momentarily difficult for Robin to keep his expression pleasant, hearing this echo of Walter’s dig at Edwin the night before. Robin hadn’t known quite what to make of Edwin’s brother. Everyone else had deferred to him, but it was more than the usual deference to a favoured and charismatic eldest son. There had been a strange, balancing-act tension in the air that casual sibling animosity couldn’t explain. It had put Robin’s teeth on edge, and it was a relief to know that Walt wouldn’t be a regular member of the house party.
“Bel’s leaving everyone to their own devices this morning, but she’ll insist you both join us for boating on the lake after lunch,” Charlie said to Robin.
“I don’t know if we’ll be—” Robin started, but Charlie said, “Nonsense!” and turned back to his bowl of kedgeree.
Robin swallowed half a cup of tea in two gulps, winced at the spasm of complaint in his throat, and murmured something noncommittal as he escaped the breakfast room.
When he found the library, he stopped a few feet inside the door in order to stare. He’d been in manor-house libraries before. Even Thornley Hill had a modest one, and he’d been envisaging something like that: a room stuffy with dust and gloomy with solid last-century furnishings, shelves packed with matching sets of untouched leather-bound books.
The library at Penhallick House was two storeys high, with a narrow balcony running along the two walls that were lined with bookcases stretching from the floor to the ceiling. Another wall held arch-topped windows, their curtains caught at the waists to allow morning light to spill into the room. A single rug was set well back from the fireplace that dominated the final wall, a mouth of wrought iron surrounded by tiles patterned with white vines on vivid orange. The rest of the floor was an intricate and angular pattern of inlaid wood, blond and amber-brown shades set at angles to one another, crawling in regular lines from one wall to the next.
That was what you saw looking straight ahead. Looking up, all you saw was books. Robin remembered, belatedly, Edwin saying that they had one of the largest private collections in the country.
Hawthorn had called Edwin a librarian and clearly meant it as an insult. But Robin felt like he was viewing a page from a book on exotic creatures, demonstrating how the patterns of their hides allowed them to blend into their surroundings. Edwin stood near the centre of the library floor, shirtsleeves rolled to mid-forearm, one hand turning the page of a thick book splayed open on a table while the other scratched at the back of his neck. Looking at him, Robin realised that before this moment he’d never seen Edwin Courcey look even the slightest bit comfortable.
Robin let the heavy door swing noiselessly shut behind him, and cleared his throat. Edwin’s head rose.
“There you are,” said Edwin, as though Robin were a tardy schoolboy. “When you said paint, were you joking around?”
“Good morning to you too,” said Robin. “What paint?”
“Last night, you said you could paint your visions.”
Robin had been joking, more or less. He was a mediocre artist at best. But he thought about trying to cram words around what he’d seen, with Edwin’s impatient eyes needling him, and suddenly the alternative didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“I can try drawing one of them,” he said. “If you’ve pencils?”
A nod. “I do. Now, come here and roll up your sleeve.”
So it was Edwin who wielded the pencils first, while Robin held out his bared right forearm and Edwin copied down the runes of the curse with painstaking care. Neither of them commented on the fact that it reached fully to Robin’s elbow now. Curled up in the corner of Robin’s soul, like a summer-basking snake, was the fear that had opened its eyes when Hawthorn first said, It’ll keep getting worse. Every time the pain claimed him that fear shed its skin and grew larger.