Of course he was praying.Whenever you found Edith scribbling, Simon outside with his animals, and Aunt Emily in the garden, you would find Uncle George praying.
“Oh, my child,” said her uncle, his face lighting at the sight of her.He got up, moved round the desk, and put careful hands on her shoulders, as one holds a wild thing for fear of startling it.
She couldn’t look at him.His delight at seeing her struck deeper than Edith’s scolding or Una’s coldness.
“I’ve been a beast,” Violet said to the floor.
“It was a hard blow for you, my dear,” he said quietly, “a very great disappointment.”
She looked up to meet his eyes.She had dreaded to encounter godly forbearance, but instead she found nothing but compassion and apology.Had Una told her about Elfed?
“None of us expected it,” he went on, and now Violet knew he did not mean Elfed, but the other thing that had pushed her to run away.“I blame myself for encouraging that young man’s visits,” he said sadly.“I hoped that you might be a good influence on him, given his family situation in Wales, but I should have thought of you before I thought of him.”
Violet resisted a snort.Good influence—her?On her Welsh sweetheart, of all people?
She thought of a wild summer night and the two of them stealing away on Cariad’s back to fly among the storm clouds, and Gwydion singing in Welsh next to her ear, his curls black and dripping with rain.At least, it had been singing until the lightning started; after that she had a hunch it was mostly calling out to God for mercy.
Violet and Gwydion had been terrible for each other.
Terrible—and wonderful.
Uncle George indicated a chair.“Would you like to tell me about the last two years?Places?People?”
Violet licked her lips, brought forward abruptly in time to another subject she didn’t want to talk about.
“I’m not sure you’d like to hear about it, Uncle George,” she said honestly.
“My dear,” said Uncle George briskly, “I was a clergyman for twenty years, and I’ve been a dragon-keeper now for ten.I am not sure which of the two was more hair-raising.There’s not much Ihaven’theard.”
Violet considered this, rapidly concluding that whatever her Uncle George had encountered during his career as a rector in the East Midlands had not prepared him sufficiently for the stories she could tell.
“I think—I’d like to eat breakfast now,” she said, thinking of the abandoned eggs downstairs.“I’ve missed Martha’s kedgeree.”
Chapter twenty-two
London
Crispinsteppedoutatmidmorning to smoke a quiet pipe in the alley behind the Colonial Office.As he shielded it to light it, there came a sudden flurry of footsteps.He turned to face whoever it was running up behind him but too late—for at the same moment a bag made of some rough fabric descended over his head.
His shout of alarm was drowned out by a coughing fit from a motorcar.For a moment, he thought it might run him down, but arms hedged him in on either side, and he was rushed into its rumbling interior instead.
A low voice said, “It’s him, let’s go,” and they were off.
“See here,” Crispin said as soon as he had collected his wits, “I think you’ve got the wrong man.I’m just the fellow who makes the maps.”
As soon as he’d spoken, he regretted it.He should have pretended to be whoever it was they were after—that was the sort of thing chaps did in novels where things like this happened on the regular.Then they got a chance to be the hero by protecting whoever their valuable doppelgänger turned out to be.
“Crispin Fairweather of number 14 Brunswick Square?”the voice said.
“Oh,” Crispin said, “right, then.”
He felt almost pleased for a moment.Then a great many unpleasant ideas flitted across his mind.The worst of them was that he might be used as a bargaining chip to get at his father.But his mind was at work on other data, too—he’d had one glimpse of a sleeve as the bag had been brought down, and there was the smell of the motor they had brought him in.
All of it made his mind work like mad.Here was a mystery with himself at the centre.He felt as if he had woken up from a nap.
It wasn’t a bad feeling.Not yet, anyway.
When the bag was whisked off twenty-eight minutes later, Crispin found himself in a bare room that could have belonged to almost any building in London.
