Page 41 of Apt to be Suspicious
Pen closed her eyes. “Why are you telling me all of this? And what gives you the right to decide to do something about this? You said you’ve an obligation to the land magic. I don’t know about all of that, what it means. But that’s not really it, is it?” Then she added, annoyed. “Why did you ask me for help in the first place?”
Edmund’s shoulder twitched. She was not at all sure whether it was a deliberate move— he’d just been talking about knowing people looked for certain movements or poses— or an unguarded reaction. But this was Edmund Carillon. She wasn’t sure he knew what an unguarded reaction was. Quietly, suddenly, with all of his focus entirely on her, and that was disturbing in new directions she didn’t have time to think about, he spoke deliberately. “Who else would I ask? I do not have an array of friends here.”
“You barely know me. Knew me even less when you asked!” Pen spread her hands, and then she blinked at him. “Do you not have friends here?”
“People I trust to have the good of the community at heart, who have more than sufficient magical training to understand some of what they’re seeing, and who are resident in Oxford? Not so many as all that. None, actually, other than what you have given me. Who are students, at any rate.”
Pen rocked back again. “Are we— friends?”
“That is for you to decide, isn’t it? You can choose from the evidence before you. I have invited you into my home and warding. I have told you some things I do not share lightly.” Edmund’s voice was odd now, but Pen wasn’t sure how to describe it. Not hollow, that implied an empty space that wasn’t there. Not stern either. There was no harshness there at all. Something old, the way brasses in cathedrals got worn smooth by centuries of people touching them.
There was no reason she should. But she found herself saying carefully, “I am glad you feel you can trust me with what you’ve said.”
Edmund’s expression shifted minutely, then there was a chime from his journal before he could say anything else. “Beg pardon, that might be relevant.” He stood, crossed to his desk, and brought the book back. He thumbed it open to a particular page, one that seemed to have a ribbon bookmark. Then he read through it, his finger tracing down the side of the page, and looked up. “I have just confirmed that I can trust you, yes. By someone who knows what you did in the war.” Then he went on, as if that were an entirely ordinary sentence to say, even though it wasn’t. “Also, it will take some additional checks, but he’s fairly certain there’s something odd about Cecily Styles, and I am thanked for bringing it to his attention.”
“May I ask who the antecedent is in this sentence? You know you’re better at grammar than I am,” Pen said it as calmly as she could. She did not feel calm, but she had learned how to seem like she might be if no one looked too closely.
“The man I worked for during the war.” Edmund took a breath, then said, “You asked why I think I have the right.”
“Yes.” This did not remotely feel like safer ground, but Pen wasn’t sure any of that was on offer. She was certain she didn’t have the skills or strategy to trick Edmund into talking about anything he didn’t choose to. Letting him decide what to say was at least being informative and intriguing.
“Twice— well, more than twice, but there are two I’m going to talk about in a moment— my family has been involved in situations where there was nothing that could be brought to the Guard, not yet. Insufficient evidence. You probably haven’t heard of one of them, but I suspect you’ve heard about the other. The second was just two years ago.”
“I will admit to paying a reasonable amount of attention to the news in the last few years, yes, when given the chance. Before the end of the war or after?”
“After VE Day, over the summer.” Edmund gave the reply promptly. “Though relating to matters going back about two decades.”
“Begin where it seems sensible, then.” Pen considered her options and leaned forward to pour herself more tea and, after looking at him inquisitively, fill Edmund’s cup again. He picked it up, cradling it in his hands.
He began to talk about a matter from the summer before his parents married, a woman who felt she had a grievance against his father. Something having to do with the lure of a rather addictive magical drink. Edmund did not explain the details. He mentioned the specifics were not terribly relevant, but that if she wanted more information later, she knew where to ask.
Pen did not know what to do with that but nod and agree that she did. Not that she was confident it would produce answers that made much more sense. But she could agree that some people got wrong ideas in their heads about how to deal with problems. No one who spent much time around a vicarage had illusions about that. “What happened to her?”
“Medea Aylett escaped to America. She’s since been bound magically not to return without permission. Also not to harm Papa or Mama or any of our family.” Edmund shrugged. “I gather she did a fair bit of research and development for the Americans during the war. Talented as an alchemist as was her husband. But they also rather affected the entire line of prestigious alchemy for a good two decades. If you want that discussion, however, I should introduce you to Ursula Fortier properly. She has a whole twenty minutes on it. More than twenty if you ask any questions.”
Pen considered his tone there. “Would you be talking to her about this if she were at Oxford?”
“Oh, yes. I talked some of it out with her last week. And Anthony Edgarton. The three of us get along. We’re near enough the same age. Our families have similar takes on some things, and we decided we’d back each other up in various ways. Great Families nonsense, mostly.” He said the last part offhandedly, as if he had several dozen opinions and examples about that handy. “But they’re not up at Oxford, and they don’t understand how things work here. You do. And you’ve an eye for what’s normal and what isn’t. They’ve both chosen to spend their lives far more entangled in Albion.”
Pen couldn’t really argue with that. It was unfair of him to point out, but since it was in fact a compliment, she couldn’t really tell him he was wrong. Not properly. “All right. And the other story?”
“This one goes back to the death of my uncle Temple. Papa’s older brother, he was— he died before I was born.” Now Edmund was speaking cautiously, more slowly, but he was letting her see he was doing that, she was sure. “We know now some of what happened— his land magic was rotting away, because he’d been doing experimental magic. It was well-meant, at least initially. Uncle Temple wanted the Great War to stop. Before more people— Papa very much at the front of the list— were killed or injured in uncountable, unmendable ways.”
Pen suddenly realised why the Iliad might hold so much weight for Edmund. Not that she hadn’t intellectually known, but putting it like that, the sort of phrase that belonged in an epic, gave it a new heft. “What happened?”
“Uncle Temple died. The woman who’d been— who’d come up with an awful idea and egged him on— went off to a series of diplomatic postings with her husband. In ‘45, they came back to Albion.” Edmund looked up, meeting Pen’s eyes for the first time in a while. “Margot and Reynold Williams. It turned out they’d done quite a lot more over the years— blackmail, certainly. There’s some evidence about keeping company with a German spy right before the war in Paris. The two of them destroyed a number of lives.”
“I saw the news about that.” It had been all over the magical papers, in fact. Mum had sent along notes about it when Pen hadn’t been able to get them directly. “She was— she dressed for that sort of femme fatale role, didn’t she? I saw photos.”
“Oh, decidedly.” Edmund’s shoulder twitched again. “Mama helped figure it out. Along with Anthony’s grandmother and Professor Wain, actually. And Professor Fortier, for a part of it. Various consulting experts, figuring out how to get enough solid evidence they could get her under the truth magics.”
“Huh.” Pen considered that. “I suppose someone like that would be talented at, erm. Not leaving evidence around. And you need that for the legal rounds. It’s, it isn’t not blackmail, exactly. But it’s for a noble cause. Stopping other people from getting hurt. And you think whatever is going on here is like that?”
“There are people who are getting hurt— we know about stolen jewellery, which is not perhaps the entirely compelling category. Not our problem to solve anyway, not without more cause. But there’s the blackmail, the notes in the paper and the payments. Something just feels oily and slippery about the whole thing. I remember Mama talking about that with Margot Williams. There was just something that felt wrong, rotten to the roots, in a way that made it impossible to step back if you cared about the rot not spreading.”
“We’re only in university,” Pen protested. But then she swallowed. “But it’s our community too. Even if I don’t much want to be in close community with someone like Phipps. He wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“More fool him,” Edmund said, emphatic now. He leaned back, watching her. “When I talked to Ursula and Anthony, I mentioned you as part of the conversation, that you were clever in ways I was and in ways I wasn’t. Ursula pointed out there’s nothing wrong with having a clever friend.” He stopped there, but Pen wondered if there might have been more.
