Edwin’s eyes were wide and his shoulders were held brittle and stiff. “There’s been a complication,” he said.
“What kind of—” Robin began, and then heard a burst of familiar laughter coming from inside the parlour, and knew exactly what kind.
Most of the Walcott party was arranged on various pieces of furniture. Every one of them was wearing a different expression; every one of them turned to look as Robin entered the room, Edwin on his heels.
“Sir Robin!” said Belinda, looking effervescent and modern in a pink walking suit. Her expression was one of delight with an edge to it. “Look who’s turned up and agreed to come boating with us this afternoon.”
Robin turned his attention to the girl next to Belinda. Her attire was much more sombre: the dark grey of mourning wear. She rose to her feet when she saw him.
Robin said, “Maud?”
She was already halfway across the room, face pinching into a frown, and she snatched up one of Robin’s hands in hers so that she could press it. Robin let her hold tight enough to steady the fine tremor of her fingers that meant there were too many unfamiliar eyes upon her. She could turn her laugh on like an electric light, but she couldn’t quash this. Robin wanted simultaneously to embrace her and to shake her, but she’d have appreciated neither.
“Robin!” said his sister, aghast. “Darling, whatever happened to your face?”
“I had a disagreement with a hedge,” said Robin. “More to the point, Maudie, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here for the shooting season. What do you think, Robin? I’m here for you.”
“How—what—how did you even know where I was?”
“Your typist told me,” she said promptly, releasing his hand. “Miss Morrissey. I liked her.”
Robin opened his mouth with a storm’s worth of further one-syllable questions building inside it.
Maud went on hastily: “I went to the Home Office. And I asked, and asked, and asked, and eventually someone managed to track down your new office for me.”
“Maud—”
“I didn’t lie,” she said. “Although . . . I may have let some very nice men make a teensy few incorrect assumptions about the nature of the home emergency that led me to be trying urgently to find you.”
Robin’s head was threatening to throb. “Home emergency?”
Maud cast her green eyes down, then peeped them up at him. She looked altogether forlorn. Robin could only imagine half of the civil service turning gruffly avuncular in the face of this look, and the other half tripping over their tongues to make themselves agreeable to the owner of those eyes.
“I broke Mother’s favourite vase,” she said meekly.
Robin stared at her, anger and disbelief bubbling up through him, but somehow by the time it hit his throat it was laughter. He exhaled a long chuckle, helpless, and Maud’s eyes creased with relief.
“Did you honestly?”
She nodded.
“The—” He gestured a bulbous shape.
“The hideous one she inherited from Great-Aunt Agatha,” Maud confirmed.
“Don’t tell me you walked all the way here from the station,” cut in Edwin.
“No! Win, it’s the most amazing joke!” said Belinda. “The dear thing arrived at the station with a packed bag and simply asked around the shopkeepers until she found someone who would bring her here in a pony-trap.”
“Asked and asked and asked,” muttered Robin. One of Maud’s dimples peeked out unrepentantly. “If you’re not here to tell me about the untimely death of Great-Aunt Agatha’s vase, then why did you need to come on such an adventure?” he asked, though it was a weak question. With Maud, the adventure itself was the point.
“You think I don’t know when you’re hiding?” Maud demanded. “I told you I wanted to go to university, Gunning’s been calling every day to press you for decisions on the estate, and you make weak noises for two days and then run off to the country on some excuse about work? And it’s ever so dull, at home, without you—and with Mother and Father gone.”
Her eyes were almost artfully wide and pleading. Robin dearly wished that the mere prospect of believing him to be a member of the secret service would be enough to dissuade his younger sister from rushing headlong into the unknown. He also didn’t believe for a minute that she’d run here only to seek comfort, though it clearly held water as an excuse with the others, who’d see only an impulsive young girl in mourning clothes. Dull was a very carefully chosen truth.