Page 63 of A Study in Drowning

He looked back at her in concern, and then said in a tight voice, “Let’s just read the last one. It’s short.”

1 March 190

My beautiful and debauched girl,

You said something to me last night, as we lay together, that I shall not soon forget. I was near to sleeping, but you pulled the covers over your naked breast and sat up. Leaning over me, you said, “I will love you to ruination.”

I sat up as if I’d been prodded, since neither of us had said those trite three words to the other before, and answered somewhat groggily, “Whose ruination? Yours or mine?”

You did not answer, and I still wonder.

Yours (in every conceivable fashion),

E.M.

“That’s the line,” Effy whispered. “From Angharad.”

Preston swallowed. “‘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.’”

“From the first time they lie together.” Effy’s voice was trembling. “On their wedding night.”

“Spring of one-ninety,” said Preston, and his voice was shaking a little, too. “That would have been around the time that Myrddin began writing Angharad—or allegedly began writing Angharad. It all lines up.”

Effy shook her head. Her vision was crowding with blackness, panic surging up in her like a wave. “I still don’t understand.”

“This is the connection to Blackmar. Not friendship or employment—Myrddin had an affair with Blackmar’s daughter, and somehow Angharad was born from it. No wonder Blackmar was so cagey when discussing it. I don’t know how Greenebough factors in, or why the decision was made to have the book published under Myrddin’s name—if indeed it was Blackmar’s work, of course—but it’s conceivable that the daughter was somehow part of the . . . negotiation process.”

“You’re saying they bartered her, like a piece of livestock.” Effy wished she could drift from her own body, to slip out that secret door into the safe, submerged place. But her body seemed to be holding on to her mind with all its might: blood hot, stomach churning, terrible signs of life. “And if Blackmar was so concerned about his daughter’s purity, and Myrddin clearly took it, then why would he let Myrddin have Angharad, too? That diary entry says Blackmar delivered the manuscript to him in August of one-ninety-one.”

She could hardly choke out the words. Preston was looking at her with even greater concern now.

“Effy,” he said slowly, “are you all right?”

“That line.” Her eyes were hot with unshed tears. “‘I will love you to ruination.’ That’s one of Angharad’s most famous lines, and Myrddin didn’t even come up with it.”

Preston hesitated. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle. “Writers take things from their real lives all the time. It’s not as though the phrase is copyrighted.”

Logically Effy understood that. But it still felt wrong; all of it felt so wrong. “I wish we could talk to her. Blackmar’s daughter.”

“That would be the simplest solution,” Preston conceded. “But we’ll have to make do with speaking to Greenebough’s editor.”

The sense of wrongness sat in her belly like a stone. She could not evict the image of Myrddin from her mind: lying in bed beside a young girl while she spoke aloud Angharad’s most famous line.

She wished she could return to that day in her dorm room, when she had stared at his author photo in the back of her book, when this had been just a blank space upon which she could hurl her desires like paint on a canvas. She didn’t want answers anymore. Every new clue she uncovered was like a blow to the back of the head: brisk, sudden, agonizing.

She and Preston searched thoroughly under the bed in case there were more straggling letters, but found nothing but dust.

Right before they were about to give up and go down for breakfast, Effy’s fingers closed around something hard and cold. When she brought it out, her palm and fingers were covered in tiny nicks. A knife.

It was as small as something you might use to cut fruit in the kitchen, but its handle was silver and there was a faint rust around the blade. She and Preston looked at each other as she gripped it close to her chest. Neither of them needed to speak to know that it was iron.

They dressed and went downstairs, Effy still feeling queasy. There they discovered that an entire buffet had been laid out in the dining room. The black-clad domestics looked even fancier and even more resolute than the day before, skulking around like somber monks, dusting furniture penitently. Finding no traditional breakfast food (much to Effy’s dismay, as she’d hoped for tea to settle her stomach), they ate stuffed olives and tiny fruit tarts that dissolved in sugar on her tongue.

It was odd that Blackmar had left a banquet for them, with only supper food, but after last night’s unaccompanied brandy, Effy supposed it was in character for the old man. She was reaching for a second tart when Blackmar himself strode in, wearing a suit with a sensible pocket square.

“What are you doing?” he cried in dismay. “This food is for the party!”

Preston choked on his pastry. “What party?”