“Oh, yes,” Blue lied swiftly. She was very interested in hearing about how Malory saw auras, which was firmly in her circle of interests, and less interested in hearing about deaths of mothers, which was decidedly outside of her circle of interests.
“It’s a shocking story,” Malory said, with some relish. Then, because of Blue’s face or stature, he told her the story. He finished with, “And I could see her aura slowly vanish. So you see, this is how I know that Gwenllian belongs in a place like this.”
Blue dragged an expression back onto her face. “Hold on. What? I missed something in here.”
“Her aura is like yours — it’s blue,” he said. “The clairvoyant aura!”
“Is it?” She was going to be extremely annoyed if this was how she had gotten her name — like naming a puppy Fluffy.
“That color of aura belongs to those who can pierce the veil!”
She decided that telling him that she couldn’t, in fact, pierce the veil would only prolong the conversation.
“It’s why I was originally drawn to Gansey,” Malory continued. “Despite his mercurial personality, he has a very pleasant and neutral aura. I don’t feel like I am with another person when I am with him. He doesn’t take from me. He is a little louder now, but not very much.”
Blue had only a very limited understanding of what mercurial meant, and that limited understanding was having a very bad time of trying to apply it to Gansey. She asked, “What was he like, back then?”
“They were glorious days,” Malory replied. Then, after a pause, he added, “Except for when they weren’t. He was smaller then.”
The way he said smaller made it seem as if he wasn’t talking about height, and Blue thought she knew what he meant.
Malory continued, “He was still trying to prove that he hadn’t just hallucinated. He was still quite obsessed with the event itself. He seems to have grown out of that, fortunate for him.”
“The event — the stinging? The death, I mean?”
“Yes, Jane, the death. He puzzled it over all the time. He was always drawing bees and hornets and stuff-and-such. Got screaming nightmares over it — he had to get his own place, since I couldn’t sleep with it, as you might well imagine. Sometimes these fits would happen during the day, too. We’d just be toddling through some riding path in Leicestershire and next thing I knew he’d be on the ground clawing his face like a mental patient. I let him be, though, and he’d run his course and be fine like nothing had happened.”
“How terrible,” whispered Blue. She imagined that easy smile Gansey had learned to throw up over his true face. With shame, she recalled how she had once wondered what would have made a boy like him, a boy with everything, ever learn such a skill. How unfair she’d been to assume love and money would preclude pain and hardship. She thought of their disagreement in the car the night before with some guilt.
Malory hadn’t seemed to hear her. “Such a researcher, though. Such a keen nose for hidden things. You can’t train that! You have to be born with it.”
She heard Gansey’s voice in the cave, hollow and afraid: “Hornets.”
She shivered.
“Of course, then he just went one day,” Malory mused.
“What?” Blue focused abruptly.
“I should not have been surprised,” the professor said in an offhand voice. “I knew he was a great traveler. But we were not truly done researching, I thought. We had a bit of a toss-up, patched it up. But then, one morning, he was just gone.”
“Gone how?”
The Dog had climbed onto Malory’s chest and now licked his chin. Malory didn’t push him away. “Oh, gone. His things, his bags. He left much of it behind, what he didn’t need. But he never returned. It was months before he called me again, like nothing had happened.”
It was hard to imagine Gansey abandoning anything that way. All around him were things he clung to ferociously. “He didn’t leave a note, or anything?”
“Just gone,” Malory said. “After that, his family called me sometimes, trying to find out where he’d gone.”
“His family?” She felt like she was being told a story about a different person.
“Yes, I told them what I could, of course. But I didn’t really know. It was Mexico before he came to me, then Iceland after, I think, before the States. I doubt I know the half of it still. He picked himself up and moved so easily, so quickly. He had done it so many times before England, Jane, and it was old hat to him.”
Past conversations were slowly realigning in Blue’s head, taking on new shades of meaning as they did. She recalled one charged night on the side of a mountain, looking down at Henrietta lit like a fairy village. Home, he’d said, like it pained him. Like he couldn’t believe it.
It wasn’t exactly like the story Malory had just told conflicted with the Gansey she knew. It was more like the Gansey she’d seen was a partial truth.
“It was cowardice and stupidity,” Gansey said from the doorway. He leaned on the doorjamb, hands in pockets, as he often did. “I didn’t like good-byes, so I just abstained, and I didn’t think about the consequences.”
Blue and Malory both peered at him. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been standing there.
“It’s very decent of you,” he continued, “to not say anything about it to me. It’s more than I deserved. But know that I’ve regretted it, a lot.”
“Well,” said Malory. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable. The Dog looked away. “Well. What is the verdict on your cavewoman?”
Gansey put a mint leaf in his mouth; it was impossible to not think of the night before, when he’d put one in hers. “She stays here, for now. That wasn’t me, that was Persephone. I offered to fix the first floor of Monmouth. That might still end up being what happens.”
“Who is she?” Blue asked. She tried the name: “Gwenllian.” She wasn’t saying it right — the double lls were not said anything like they looked.
“Glendower had ten children with his wife, Margaret. And at least four … not with her.” Gansey said this part with distaste; it was clear that he didn’t find this fitting for his hero. “Gwenllian is one of the four illegitimate on record. It’s a patriotic name. There were two other very famous Gwenllians who were associated with Welsh freedom.”
There was something else he wanted to say, but he didn’t. It meant it was unpleasant or ugly. Blue said, “Spit it out, Gansey. What is it?”
He said, “The way she was buried — the tomb door had Glendower on it, and so did the coffin lid. Not an image of her. We can ask her, though getting real information out of her is quite a thing, but it seems likely to me that she was buried in a shill grave.”
“What’s that?”
“Sometimes when there’s a very rich grave, or a very important one, they’ll put a duplicate grave somewhere nearby, but easier to find, to give grave robbers something to find.”
Blue was scandalized. “His own daughter?”
“Illegitimate,” Gansey said, but he was unhappy as he did. “You heard her. As punishment for something. It is all so distasteful. I am starving. Where did Par — Adam and Ronan go?”