Page 49 of A Study in Drowning

“What do you mean?” Preston looked affronted. “It’s brisk and professional. I didn’t want to waste his time.”

“He has to be in his nineties now, Blackmar. He has plenty of time on his hands. Where’s the flattery? The beseeching? You could’ve at least pretended to be a fan of his work.”

“I told you, I don’t like lying.”

“This is for a good cause. Isn’t it worth lying a little bit, if it helps get to the truth?”

“Interesting paradox. Llyr doesn’t have a patron saint of blessed liars for nothing. Do parents ever name their children after Saint Duessa?”

Effy’s skin prickled. She didn’t want to go down this dark road. “Some, I guess. But stop changing the subject. I’m making fun of your terrible letter.”

Preston let out a breath. “Fine. Why don’t you write one, then?”

“I will,” she said with resolve.

That night, Effy wrote her letter, beseeching and full of flattery. They couldn’t risk putting it in Hiraeth’s postbox, since Ianto could easily check it, so Preston drove down to Saltney to send it.

“There’s nothing to do now except wait,” Preston said. “And I’ll keep looking through the diary.”

Effy found her mind lingering on a different mystery, the one she still didn’t have the courage to tell Preston about. The Fairy King, the ghost, Ianto’s strange conversation. The thoughts haunted her both sleeping and waking, and she found herself fleeing Hiraeth as quickly as she could at night, barreling toward the safety of the guesthouse.

It was almost a relief to not think about Myrddin for a while. She didn’t want to remember the photographs, the diary entry where he’d called women frivolous. A part of her wished she’d never seen any of it at all.

At least distracting Ianto turned out to be easy. For him, Effy drew sketches that would never leave the paper, floor plans that would never be realized. She found that he was a willing audience for her lies. He wanted to believe, as she once had (as maybe a part of her still did) that the project of Hiraeth was more than just an imagined future. A castle in the air.

“I like the look of the second floor here,” Ianto said, as they spread out her drawings over the dining table. “The bay windows overlooking the sea—it will be lovely for watching the sunrise and sunset. My mother will like it, too.”

“Does your mother not want me to be here?” Effy had been holding on to the question practically since she arrived at Hiraeth, but after the odd half conversation she’d overheard, it was killing her more than ever not to ask it.

Now seemed like a good time. Ianto was in a jaunty mood. The sun was wriggling through the clouds. The Fairy King had not appeared to her since that day in the car, and Ianto had never brought up the incident. To him, it seemed, the whole event had never occurred.

Ianto leaned back in his chair and let out a breath. There was a long stretch of silence, and Effy worried that there was not, in fact, a good time to ask the question after all.

“She’s a very private woman,” he said at last. “My father made her that way.”

Effy’s stomach clenched. “What do you mean?”

“He grew up in dire poverty, as you know. He hardly had more than the clothes on his back, and his father’s little fishing boat. When he finally did have something of his own, he was loath to let it go.” Another beat of silence. “This house—he let it decay rather than have any stranger come to fix the leaking pipes or broken windows, much less the crumbling foundation. It’s a good metaphor, I think, but I’m no literary scholar like our other guest.”

He almost never mentioned Preston by name. He called him the student or the Argantian. Ianto’s words reminded Effy of a certain passage from Angharad.

“I will love you to ruination,” the Fairy King said, brushing a strand of golden hair from my cheek.

“Yours or mine?” I asked.

The Fairy King did not answer.

That made her think of the photographs again, and that made her cheeks turn pink. Maybe she didn’t want to know about the ghost, about Myrddin’s widow, about whatever secrets Ianto was hiding. It was all tangled up like catch in a fishing net, nearly dead things thrashing as they choked on air.

Maybe Preston was right about why people believed in magic. The truth was an ugly, dangerous thing.

“Well,” Effy said, “I’ll try my best to stay out of your mother’s way.”

“Oh, I doubt you’ve disturbed her,” Ianto said. His colorless eyes had taken on a bit of that odd gleam she’d seen in the pub, and it startled her so much that she jerked back in her seat. “You’re as demure as a little kitten.”

Effy tried a smile. Fingers trembling, she gripped the hag stones in her pocket.

Only a day after her conversation with Ianto, there was a letter in Hiraeth’s postbox. Effy and Preston had both been staking it out at all hours to intercept the letter before Ianto could see it. It happened to arrive on Effy’s watch, and she seized it, clutched it to her chest, and ran up the stairs to the house. She didn’t care that it was still daylight and Ianto might see her and be furious; she burst into the study, breathing hard, and slapped the envelope down in front of Preston.