“Indeed. Light reading,” said Edwin dryly.
Robin’s laughter startled out too quickly for him to snatch it back. That small smile flickered on Edwin’s face again. Robin opened the purple book to see its own title, which was set above the smaller-type words BY A ROMAN.
“Exploits of a Cabin Boy. I think I remember this one. Heavy on the, ah, whippings.”
“I—” said Edwin, and there was a sharp, casual rap from the library’s open door.
“Look at you fellows, startling like someone’s set off a lightning charm,” said Billy Byatt. “Stir yourselves and wash up for lunch: Bel’s orders. What’s so bally important that you’ve spent the whole morning cooped up with books, anyhow?”
“Government work,” said Edwin. “Research. I’m sure you’d find it dull.”
“No doubt,” said Billy cheerfully. “Chop-chop!” and was gone again.
Robin slid the Roman tract back into the treatise, and together they returned the mistreated books to the shelf before they left the library. The atmosphere between them had become both lighter and more weighty, somehow. What Hawthorn had implied about Edwin, the purple tract had confirmed. And it would have been far more than that, for Edwin. It would have been tantamount to realisation—a first dawning glimpse of the fact that Robin, too, was a man who sought the company of other men, or at least was familiar with one of the more popular writers of homosexual erotica distributed through an otherwise reputable shop on Charing Cross Road.
Robin thought about the string that Edwin used in his spells: how a particular cradle might have five or six or eight lines of the pattern joining one hand to another. Binding them close. Robin and Edwin had already shared a handful of secrets, and now they shared another, and this awareness of their common nature—in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with magic—hung delicate and unspoken between them as they left the room.
The lake was edged with boggy reeds and stretches of coarse sand, with seven small rowboats scattered around its shore like compass points. The day still looked bright and idyllic, but a cool wind had picked up.
Robin had his hands thrust into his pockets as he and Edwin followed the others down the path to the lake. He cast a glance at Edwin and said, as though it had been on his mind, “You really don’t like this place. The outdoors bits of it, at least.”
“No,” said Edwin shortly. He certainly didn’t like boating, and yet here he was. After what had happened yesterday with the arrow, he didn’t trust his sister to safely involve someone unmagical in her games.
“I never know how to feel about Thornley Hill, myself,” said Robin. “Haven’t been back for years, and we only ever had a few winters there when I was a boy.”
“My family’s blood-pledge to this land is almost younger than I am. My parents did the dedication ceremony when they bought it, because that’s what one does. But power fills the gaps in this as well. And I haven’t enough, and the land knows. I didn’t know any better until I went away to school and suddenly it was different, suddenly it was . . .” Like he could take a full breath for the first time. Like the incredible loudness of a perpetual noise ceasing. “It’s better in the city. More distractions.” Edwin closed his mouth. He’d said more, and more easily, than he’d intended.
“Chin up,” said Robin, clapping Edwin’s shoulder in a rah-the-Blues kind of way. “I suppose we city fellows must grin and bear these things from time to time.”
He demonstrated the grin in question, sunny as the sky. Edwin felt a prickle of pleasure at the sight, and hastily quashed it. He wasn’t searching for kinship. He wasn’t looking to have things in common with Sir Robert Blyth, who was pleasant and hearty and probably born with an oar in one hand and a cricket bat in the other.
But you have a taste in common, a treacherous voice in him murmured. You know you do.
Edwin dragged his eyes down to his own feet, cursing his complexion as it heated. He’d honestly forgotten that he’d brought any Roman tracts to Penhallick from the city.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, any more than it mattered that Robin’s hair shone like polished wood in the sunlight, or that he’d rolled his sleeves up past his elbows again and Edwin wanted to trace the veins and tendons of those well-cut rower’s forearms with his own fingertips, learn their textures, make a small sensory memory for himself to pull out on quiet nights in front of the fire. He’d felt like that a good handful of times at school—at university—and for the most part he’d known to avoid those boys and those men. Even when it was mutual, attraction didn’t conjure respect from nowhere. Where contempt existed, attraction could even deepen it.