A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(12)

And Robin didn’t even have the luxury of wholehearted resentment, because the irony was that those documents had probably done a lot of good. Orphans and nurses and starving families in the East End wouldn’t care a whit about the character of their deceased benefactors. Charity done out of ruthless self-promotion was still charity.

It only mattered to Robin and Maud that the rest, once the loans had been repaid, fell dismally short of what would be necessary if the two surviving members of the Blyth family were to continue to live as they had always done.

Gunning had uttered a long, stultifying speech about death-duties and how Robin needed to let him take what was left of their family’s capital and invest it sensibly, thinking of the future. Start putting some of it back into the Thornley Hill estate so that eventually it might pull its weight again.

And meanwhile, Robin was still a member of His Majesty’s Civil Service, because his parents’ delightful piece of career whimsy had somehow turned into their family’s most reliable source of income.

From a magical liaison job. Robin stared at a white patch of plate between his creamed spinach and his lamb, and thought of snowflakes, and fog.

“Ten new gowns would be tossing money,” said Maud, steely. “Newnham’s different. The education of women is the promise of the future.”

Robin sighed. “Has that Sinclair girl been dragging you to suffragette rallies again?”

The steely look strengthened; Robin weakened.

“I’ll talk to Gunning again tomorrow,” he said. “There are still plenty of things we can sell.”

“Some of this boring art, to begin with,” said Maud. “And in any case, you’ve got this new job—”

“Working at the Home Office again,” said Robin hastily. “That’s all I’ll tell you about it for now.”

Distracted, Maud turned a look of mingled admiration and hilarity onto him. She clearly thought he’d wrangled himself an intelligence job and was clamming up to protect national secrets. Robin’s grip on his fork faltered with the memory of pain.

Mercifully their talk turned to sport after that, and the investigation into the deadly ballooning accident at the Franco-British Exhibition the previous month, and then the dessert course was done and Robin escaped to the smallest sitting room with a glass of port. He loved his sister, and normally wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of the evening with her. But his thoughts were unspooling and his shoulders were high. He was, he realised, bracing himself constantly for another flare of that hot-wire sensation.

He removed his dinner jacket and settled in a comfortable chair, letting the warmth from the fire soften his tight muscles. His eyes wandered the familiar frames that crowded the walls.

A real curator might have found some rude things to say about the art that adorned this house. It was a cluttered collection with no unifying theme, full of pieces that Robin’s parents had simply wanted to own for their value as objects. The best of the lot was in this sitting room: a John Singer Sargent painting of his mother, completed when Robin was still an infant. The famed portraitist had been freshly arrived in London from Paris, and Sir Robert Blyth had leapt at the chance to commission him just as public opinion began to drag Sargent into fashion.

The artist had captured Priscilla, Lady Blyth. The lightly arch look, and the smile, were exactly right. And as for the shadows encroaching on one side of the face, the hand tucked just behind the skirt, unseen—well. Of those few people who saw the true self of Robin’s mother, only Sargent had dared to put it on display like that while she still lived. The painter must have known that neither she nor her husband would catch the irony, neither of them loving art for itself.

Lord Healsmith had been another of the few to see past the Blyths’ sparkling facade. Sir Robert, usually so canny a judge of character, had made an error when calculating exactly how much flattery could be applied to his lordship before it began to ring false. A cold public snubbing had been revenged, over time, by one of Lady Blyth’s most ice-blooded and sweet-mouthed campaigns of social poison, with the result that Lady Healsmith had fled to their Wiltshire estate to escape the glances that followed her in the street.

Robin had heard the way his father laughed when his mother proclaimed her victory.

Healsmith himself had accepted the warning, bottled up his anger, and let it ferment until it was safe to express his dislike. Robin couldn’t entirely blame the man, but he did wish Healsmith had chosen some other form of expressing it. Buying up advertising space on a block of flats, for example, and papering it with a denunciation of the much-lauded Blyths.

But you didn’t speak ill of the dead.

You punished their son, instead.

A soft knock on the door announced Maud, who crossed the room and perched herself on the arm of Robin’s chair. She gnawed on her lower lip before looking Robin in the eye. “I didn’t mean it, about the art.”

“I know,” said Robin.

“But I did mean it about Cambridge.” His sister’s heart-shaped face was uncharacteristically solemn. It was almost, but not quite, the look of their father in his dining-room portrait.

“You always mean it, Maudie,” Robin said. “That’s your charm. But you’ve never mentioned university before.”

“I wasn’t sure before. Now I am. Look here, Robin, I know what you think, but I’ll still mean it next week. Next month.”