Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty Five: Smitten

Edinburgh, 1867:

Myrrha's love spells were not dissimilar to the amnesia spells she used to suppress love. If Robin and Jack had been more communicative, they could have compared notes. Both spells had a deadening influence. Both cut you off from parts of your mind and made your character subtly different.

To Robin, it felt like being under a mild anaesthetic. His lips were tingly and numb. His thoughts crawled through frozen corridors – and, every so often, a falling icicle would pin them to the ground and halt them altogether.

It wasn't amnesia as such. He could remember every awful thing Myrrha had ever done to him. All his memories were accessible, they were just... lit differently. That was the only way he could think of to explain it. They weren't changed in any way, they just all showed her in a good light.

He was relatively old when she first tried the love spell on him: twenty one, living with Ellini in Edinburgh, and just starting to be able to let her out of his sight. 

He wondered afterwards if Myrrha had been waiting for the moment when it would cause the most pain to Ellini, because he was relaxing his guard, and she was not trying to escape. Sometimes she reached over and touched him in the night, as if even the caresses of her tormentor were preferable to the silence in her head. Within the very specialized circumstances of Robin and Ellini's relationship, this was practically love. 

And Myrrha had chosen this time to put Robin under her spell. It couldn't be a coincidence. She was trying to torment her. The trouble was – as Robin could have told her if she'd bothered to ask – it was impossible to torment Ellini these days. Myrrha was always trying, and never getting it right. After putting Robin under her spell, she moved them both to Pandemonium, and denigrated Ellini to little more than a maid, but the girl didn't bat an eyelid.

It must have been infuriating, the way she hummed contentedly while carrying out her demeaning duties. The way she was grateful to be excluded from balls and parties. The way her rags became her better than a court dress from the House of Worth. She was like a Cinderella with no dreams. He supposed dreams weren't good for much, once you'd lived through your worst nightmare.

He and Myrrha got married on his twenty-fifth birthday – or, anyway, on the day that Myrrha had always assured him was his birthday – at St Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh. This was on the human side of the railings that divided the city in two, so some of the wedding-guests were nervous, especially among the trappings of a Christian Church. 

But it was the most spectacular building on the Royal Mile, and so it had to be the venue for Myrrha's wedding. If a wedding was an affirmation of a woman's worth, she was not going to skimp on the details.

This grew more and more apparent as the day approached, and the ferocity of her expectations became clear. All her movements had a kind of suppressed violence. It wasn't nervousness – he had never detected a trace of that in all the years he'd known her – but a determination to enjoy herself, to look perfect, to impress everyone, that robbed her movements of all their customary grace. She was jerkily, jaggedly cheerful. And somehow she was more terrifying to Robin in this incarnation than any other. He was almost glad of the deadening influence of the love spell.

As a result, his memories of his own wedding day were a patchwork of impressions, especially when it came to recalling Myrrha. He remembered voluminous skirts and piled-up hair, a twelve-foot train, loops of pearls strung across her bare, shapely back. He remembered a globe-like rose in her bouquet that resembled a pig's heart. He remembered trees inside the cathedral, stretching right up to the ceiling and spreading their foliage across it in mockery of the fan vaulting.