She blessed her exhaustion; it kept everything she might have felt far away, behind a fog. Fear, surprise, outrage. All she could manage was a sigh, and her hand cupped to catch her falling head. “That’s a bit bigger than a pencil sharpener.”

“I didn’t think it would stop them or anything.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke, and she was glad; his anger would have burnt hotter than the hearth into which it was directed. “I just wanted … it wasn’t fair. And I knew how to do it, so I did.”

“You knew how … Cyril, I suppose.” He didn’t answer that. She didn’t need him to. “Someone could have been hurt,” she said. “Killed.”

This time he did turn toward her, and gave her a look that made her feel she’d missed a lesson and just given an unpardonably stupid answer to an easy question.

“I knew what I was doing,” he said. Not arrogantly, but with affronted confidence. “Uncle Cyril taught me. I did it right.”

“You blew up a car, Steenie.” And then, mother love her, she began to laugh.

He regarded her suspiciously until she wiped her eyes, and then asked, “Aren’t you angry?”

“I’m furious,” she said. “I just … Oh, holy stones. You didn’t think at all.” Her head fell back against the upholstery, giving her a good view of the ceiling and the dusty medallion around the lamp. In the quiet, she could hear the squeak of coals shifting in the grate.

Stephen, perhaps knocked off his high ground by her hysterics, pulled himself out of his slouch and drew his knees to his chest. “If I don’t go back to school, what will you do with me?”

She paused, considered, and wondered where this was headed. “Well. If you can’t finish out the year at Cantrell—which I hope you’ll be able to do—there are still any number of secondary schools I’m sure would take you. If not in Gedda, then abroad.”

“You’re going to send me away?”

“That isn’t what I said at all.”

He had found a moth hole in the afghan and begun to fret with it, worsening the damage.

“What’s this about?” she asked. “Really.”

“Uncle Cyril,” he began, and of course it was. “He told me when he messed things up, at school, Granddad sort of … packed him off. And that’s how he ended up how he is. That Granddad made him be a spy and all.”