and-white striped wingback armchair and conservatively, nondescriptly dressed in a grey pinstripe suit, he was sipping tea from an elegant porcelain cup. He looked up as the butler announced his visitor.
“Ah. Mister Dunwoody,” he said, unnervingly expansive and genial. “So good of you to join me. Come in. Sit down. Would you care for some refreshment?”
Standing just inside the doorway, Gerald shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said, struggling not to sound as dazed as he felt. “Sir Alec, what was that? Lional… the hexed gates… that wizard, William? What just happened?”
Sir Alec considered him over the rim of the teacup. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, I–I thought it was real, then I thought I was dreaming, and then-” He shook his head again. “I don’t know. I’m assuming it was… all part of the test?”
Sir Alec nodded. “Correct.”
“And I passed?”
Not even this warm, cosy room could thaw Sir Alec’s smile. “Well… let’s just say you didn’t fail.”
Oh. Well. That was good… wasn’t it?
“Do sit down, Mister Dunwoody,” added Sir Alec, much less genially. “I’m not fond of repeating myself.”
He dropped onto the parlour’s couch. “Sorry, sir. So, if I’ve passed, and I’m a janitor, then what happens now?”
“Now, Mister Dunwoody?” Sir Alec put down the cup. “Now I have a job for you.”
“A job?” he repeated. He still felt not quite real. “Already?”
“Certainly,” said Sir Alec. “The government’s not in the habit of paying agents to loll about. It’s time, Mister Dunwoody, for you to get your feet slightly damp.”
CHAPTER THREE
Anyway,” said Monk, bounding back through the dining room doorway, slightly out of breath and looking ever-so-slightly flustered, “it’s going to be a while before I can fix the place up. I mean, Great-uncle Throgmorton may have left me the house but unfortunately his bequest didn’t include the dosh for repairs and modernisation and so forth.”
“Huh,” said Emmerabiblia, as Monk slid into his seat at the table. “At least Great-uncle Throgmorton remembered you exist. You and Aylesbury. He didn’t leave me so much as a copper penny, the female-hating old miser. I hardly call that fair.”
Swallowing a groan, Melissande reached for her half-nibbled bread roll. She was fond of Monk’s sister, she really was, but for the last three weeks all Bibbie could talk about was the gross unfairness of Great-uncle Throgmorton’s will. And really, once you’d agreed fifty or sixty times about the unspeakable rottenness of mingy old men who were stuck in the middle of last century, what else was there to say? Apart from Oh for the love of Saint Snodgrass, do shut up! and that would only lead to unpleasantness… which wasn’t a good idea. They had enough on their plates without adding hurt feelings to the menu.
“I know, I know, it’s not fair,” said Monk, impatiently sympathetic. Then he turned. “The thing is, Mel, Great-uncle Throgmorton was a die-hard old fogie. Women as Decorative Objects, Seen but Seldom Heard, that kind of thing. Not to be trusted with money or property or anything remotely smelling of business.”
“Yes,” she replied, with heroic restraint. “Bibbie has mentioned that, in passing. Very outdated of him.”
“Still,” he added, “you’re welcome to come and live here with me, Bibbie. I already told you that. It’s a big house, we could rattle around in it together and never bump into each other from one week to the next.”
Bibbie pulled a face. “No, thank you very much. If you want someone to pick up your discarded socks and cook your meals and dust cobwebs off the ceilings then you can blasted well pay for the privilege, Monk. I have no intention of being your housekeeper.”
“What?” Monk adopted an air of wounded disbelief. “Bibs, how can you even suggest it? I’m not Aylesbury, I’d never treat you like that! I’m the nice brother, remember?”
Even though she was still cross, Bibbie smiled, a little. “Well. Nicer than Aylesbury, anyway,” she conceded. “But I’m still not moving in. You spend most of your time staggering about in a thaumaturgical haze. I’d have to start cooking and cleaning and picking up your socks out of self-preservation and I have much better things to do with myself.”
“That’s it, ducky,” said Reg, chortling on the back of the fourth dining chair. “You tell him.”
Now Monk was looking put out. “What better things?” he muttered. “It’s not like you’re solving the great metaphysical mysteries of our time, are you?”
Which was exactly the wrong thing to say. Melissande, wincing, debated pitching the remains of her dinner roll at him. Bibbie didn’t bother debating, she just went ahead and threw her untouched bread, hard.
“Hey!” said Monk indignantly as the missile whizzed past his head to explode in a shower of crumbs against the peeling-papered wall behind him. “Don’t do that!”
“I’ll do it if I want!” Bibbie retorted. “Every time you say something horrible I’ll throw something at you, I swear. Starting with bread rolls and working my way up to-to elephants! You’re just like Aylesbury, Monk. You’re as bad as Great-uncle Throggie, and if you think I’m going to sit here and-”
“Deary, deary me,” said Reg, sidling closer along the back of her chair. “I suppose this brings back fond family memories, does it?”
Melissande spared her a sharp glance. “No.”
But of course it did. Well. Memories, anyway. Most of them… difficult. Dinner in New Ottosland’s palace with Lional and Rupert, so often a volatile affair. Of course, then it had been Lional doing the throwing and the shouting with Rupert ducking and herself cast in the thankless role of peacemaker. Usually with very little success.
She felt her insides squeeze tight. Lional.
Enough time had gone by now that she could get through two or three whole days at a stretch without once thinking of him. Guilt and regret ambushed her less frequently. But the pain was still there, buried deep and lingering. She thought it might never completely go away. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it to. If the pain went away it might take Lional with it.
And whatever else he was… whatever he became… he was my brother and part of me still loves him. Still wants to love him.
Which was, perhaps, the hardest thing of all to reconcile.
Bibbie and Monk were still spatting, dredging up nursery-tales of cross and double-cross, of who got the biggest scone at tea-time and who was never allowed to stay up late on Fireworks Night and who really put the fizzing incant in Nanny’s sugar bowl which led to everyone getting spanked.
It was all so very silly.
Melissande picked up her nibbled dinner roll, pulled it in half and took aim at her business partner and her business partner’s brother, who was also her young man. At the moment. More or less. Sometimes, it seemed, far less than more. His Research and Development work for Ottosland’s government tended to swallow Monk alive, and hardly ever spat him out again. And even when they did spend time together, a part of his attention was always… somewhere else. Off in the ether. Reg called it the peril of being involved with a genius. For herself, she preferred to call it tactless.
She tossed the bread.
As one, brother and sister turned on her. “Don’t do that!” they chorused, and even though Bibbie was magnificently fair-haired and Monk was dashingly dark, they were in that moment of unified outrage as alike as two peas in a dilapidated pod.
“Why not?” she demanded. “You’re carrying on like five-year-olds, the pair of you, so why should I be left out? What are you fighting over, anyway? Monk’s already got a housekeeper, Bibbie.” She looked at him. “Haven’t you? You must have a housekeeper. I mean, you’ve got a butler. And obviously someone’s cooked dinner.” She waved a hand at the table, littered with their emptied bowls of mock turtle soup. “And I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine the footman who helped serve the first course. So obviously you’ve got hordes of servants catering to your every whim.”
“And huddling in corners making fun of you,” Reg added. “Don’t forget that. Better than a circus you are,
