At this point the text devolved into words of a length and pompous complexity that made Robin’s mind try to shy away and think about cricket, an automatic reflex left over from university. He managed to digest the sentence: Reports exist of consciously directed foresight becoming temporally unmoored.
Whatever that meant. Robin thought of the painted boats afloat on the lake. He flicked through the rest of the books, but none were any more forthcoming on the subject of foresight’s deliberate use.
It was lighter in the room by now, though still well before the usual breakfast hour. Robin settled himself in the window seat, feeling oddly intimate as he did it, remembering the feel of Edwin’s ankle beneath his hand and the trickle of raindrops on the window. The morning chill was trying to creep in through the glass and the heat of the fire had barely spread. Robin rubbed his hands together and tucked up his knees.
Edwin had suggested that he start where the visions always start. Robin didn’t fancy holding his breath again, but he could concentrate on the palette of sensations that came before. The taste. The heat. The prickle of light.
Robin had never tried to deliberately clear his mind. He had the absurd image of taking a broom to waves on a seashore, trying to sweep the water back out across the stones. Might as well stand there like Canute and order it.
No. Concentrate.
The future. What kind of future was left to them? Either this curse comes off me or it doesn’t, Robin thought. There are people after this contract. Edwin’s involved now, and they know it.
What is going to happen?
He breathed in. Breathed out. Let his thoughts break like waves.
When the taste of pepper came, it was fainter than usual. The vision was so indistinct that Robin thought at first he was seeing another foggy day, but it wasn’t that. The lines of the library could still be glimpsed as if through a heavily grimed window. Trying to focus on the foreground, the vision itself, struck a match of pain behind Robin’s eyes. He gritted his teeth and pushed harder.
What is going to happen?
Moving shapes. A silvery blur dotted with flashes of maddening colour that never cohered—a stupid, useless pointillist picture of a vision—was that a tree? a chair? Pepper burned on Robin’s tongue and his skull throbbed with effort. I’m going to make this work, dammit, dammit—
A room. It should have been awash with flowers, and wasn’t. The parlour at Sutton Cottage. Edwin was stepping through the frame of the mirror leading into the hidden study. The glass had liquefied to allow him through, but like a rippling pond it still reflected things in a distorted fashion. There was at least one person, perhaps another, in the room. Edwin’s hand was tight on the frame; he began to glance over his shoulder, speaking—
A very young man with a head of dark curls and a poor-fitting suit, shoulders hunched as he stood in the eaves of a closed street door and scribbled fast in the kind of notebook you saw emerging from the pockets of journalists. He leaned frequently around the frame of his shelter, as if expecting someone, or afraid of being caught—
Priscilla, Lady Blyth: youthful and alive, dimples cradling her loveliest smile as she accepted the fur placed on her shoulders by her husband. Pearl buttons on her long gloves. The way that smile slipped into annoyance as she glanced upwards through the banisters to where her oldest child was crouched, watching, aching—
An explosion that sent smoke and mud in a growling cloud against the sky, a field crawling with uniformed soldiers—
Edwin lying sprawled and lifelessly white on a gravel path between perfectly manicured lawns, a group of men in evening wear straightening up from inspecting his body and looking, in eerie unison, down the path to see—
Spring sunlight sparkling like diamonds on the Cam, the view from Arthur Manning’s second-year room where it overlooked a green-cosy bend like Millais’s Ophelia, the prow of a punt just floating into view—
A blond woman with hectic colour in her cheeks and the side of her hand in her mouth, ecstasy soaking her expression, the other hand caught in the elaborate skirts of an evening dress—
Robin was losing his grip. The part of him that was still him, that was a mind dimly aware of its existence beyond the images playing themselves out, had just enough sense left to worry. The visions had gone on too long. They were becoming, if anything, more immersive. And moving faster and faster, like the flickering spin of a zoetrope. Blurring together. Dizzying.
The last image that appeared for long enough that Robin had a chance of paying it proper attention was, again, Edwin. His hands were brimming and burning with a light so bright it looked as though it could set fire to a forest. Edwin raised those hands, drawing them back as if for a blow. The look on his face was utterly unfamiliar, a snarl nearly animal in its ferocity.