Wednesday at tea time, a letter from Leo’s mother is waiting. In his room, he reads that she changed her mind on the way to the post office, deciding he may have exaggerated his distress. Misunderstanding the situation entirely—she assumes Mrs. Maudsley is sending him on errands—she argues the task cannot be wrong in such a devout household and advises him to ask for a servant to go in his place. Her refusal to recall him is firm. With escape blocked, Leo resolves to avoid Marian and take no more messages. That evening, Marian arrives from London in time for dinner; her return is uneventful.

Thursday morning, Mrs. Maudsley returns to breakfast, immediately restoring the old tension. Marian draws Leo away privately afterward, half-apologizes for her earlier outburst, and calls him hard-hearted. A remark about sleeping on harder ground puzzles Leo until he realizes she is genuinely, privately unhappy—something he had never imagined possible of her.

When Leo mentions that Lord Trimingham asked Ted to enlist, Marian is taken aback. Believing Hugh deliberately pressured Ted, she threatens to break off the engagement. Leo explains that Hugh’s motives appear purely patriotic, which calms her. He then asks bluntly why she does not marry Ted instead. She breaks down, insists she must marry Hugh, and bursts into tears. Her distress rekindles Leo’s affection and he cries with her. When she asks about Ted’s message, Leo deliberately gives her the wrong time—six o’clock rather than half past six—hoping her impatience will cause a quarrel. She questions the time but accepts it. She kisses Leo for the first time, praises him, and asks him to keep carrying their notes. Alone afterward, Leo realizes that because his mother has refused to bring him home, he will be present at Brandham when his falsified message takes effect.

After his conversation with Marian, Leo feels a warm sense of reconciliation but senses the situation remains dangerous. He worries that when Marian persuades Ted not to enlist, a confrontation with Lord Trimingham may follow. Analyzing all three parties, he grieves most for Ted, who alone treated him as a real person rather than a convenient errand boy.

Leo concludes that Ted has cast a kind of spell over Marian that has consumed all three of them and drained everything else at Brandham of meaning. He resolves to break it. His false message is a first step, but he wants to go further and settles on a magical ritual—something he genuinely dreads and that carries symbolic force.

That night, in his dressing gown, he creeps downstairs and forces himself out through the front door. At the outhouse, the mass of deadly nightshade seems to draw him in. He steps inside the thicket and panics when a berry presses against his lips, tearing at the plant until he seizes the main stem. Chanting a remembered Latin phrase, he hauls the entire plant from the ground and falls on his back, clutching the uprooted stump as earth showers his face.

Friday morning—Leo’s 13th birthday—he oversleeps for the first time. Henry the footman wakes him, warning that the prolonged heat has been unnatural and has destabilized people’s minds. The sky is gray and threatening rain. Henry notices a small ritual altar Leo has assembled on the writing table—candles propped on stacked books, the soap dish drainer above them, his silver cup on top—and leaves the dismantling to Leo.

Once alone, Leo takes apart the apparatus. The gray day confirms his sense that his summer is over. He condemns his entire conduct at Brandham—the magic, the message-carrying, the inflated sense of importance—as childish make-believe. As an expression of this new realism, he refuses to put on his green suit, which feels like a costume he has been hiding behind, and wears his old Norfolk jacket instead.

At breakfast, his choice draws gentle teasing. Lord Trimingham defends it; Marian jokes that he looks dressed to leave. Birthday letters from his mother and aunt each contain a green tie. Lord Trimingham tries on the pre-tied bow tie to spare Leo embarrassment. Mrs. Maudsley takes charge of the day’s plan, while Denys irritates her by arguing Leo has not been allowed to choose for himself. Later, Marcus quietly informs Leo that a pre-tied tie would mark him as a “cad” (291). By lunchtime, his new sober self feels flat and joyless, and he slips away to change back into the green suit.

After lunch, a threatening sky prevents the planned drive to Beeston Castle. Marian draws Leo outside and presses a letter into his hand. He resists and a noisy scuffle breaks out between them, which Mrs. Maudsley interrupts. Leo drops the letter; Marian retrieves it, shoves it in his pocket, and claims it is a note for Nannie Robson. Mrs. Maudsley cancels all outings and takes Leo for a walk in the garden.

There she presses him quietly: Does Marian often send him on messages? Does he know the way to Nannie Robson’s cottage? Leo contradicts himself badly. When Mrs. Maudsley summons the gardener to deliver the note, Leo lies and claims to have lost it, keeping the letter hidden. She sends the gardener away with a verbal message, then asks Leo directly where he takes Marian’s notes. Thunder breaks and rain begins, cutting the interrogation short.

The birthday tea assembles in the lamplit drawing room, Marian and Mrs. Maudsley both absent. Mrs. Maudsley enters, seats Leo beside her, and presents him with a small personal cake, explaining Marian will arrive around six o’clock with his present. As guests put on paper hats and pull crackers, the butler reports that Marian was never at Nannie Robson’s and has not been there all day. Mrs. Maudsley rises abruptly, her composure gone, and declares that Leo knows where Marian is and will show her the way. In the hall, Leo glimpses Marian’s green bicycle propped against the staircase. Mrs. Maudsley runs through the rain, guiding Leo rather than being guided by him, until they reach the outhouses. She seizes his hand and pulls him forward, where they find Marian and Ted together on the ground, having sex. Leo is more bewildered than horrified, but Mrs. Maudsley’s repeated screaming terrifies him. He remembers little of what followed, except learning before he left Brandham that Ted had gone home and shot himself.

Writing about 50 years after the summer of 1900, the elderly Leo explains that the memories have never settled. Following the discovery at Brandham, he suffered a mental health crisis and lost his memory of the traumatic aftermath. He refused to discuss what had happened with his mother and for months believed he had betrayed everyone. The effects were lasting: He grew distant from Marcus at school, invested little in later friendships, and turned to accumulating verifiable facts as a substitute for emotional life. He never married and ceased to feel capable of it.

Decades later, sorting through old papers, Leo finds the letter Marian had given him for Ted on his birthday, still unopened. He reassesses the past, concluding he was neither as guilty as he once believed nor entirely blameless. When he finally opens the letter, he reads that Marian had questioned the six o’clock time Leo gave her and asked Ted to come at six-thirty instead—but added that if Leo failed to deliver the note, she would be there at six and wait. He also learns that the green bicycle was a practical gift, intended to spare him the long walks as their postman. Tears come for the first time since leaving Brandham, and curiosity reawakened, he returns to the village.

At the church, he finds memorial tablets: The ninth Viscount Hugh died in 1910; his successor was born on February 12, 1901—a date whose significance takes time to register—and was killed in the Second World War. In the village, Leo meets the 11th Viscount, a young man in his mid-twenties who strongly resembles Ted Burgess. Through him, Leo learns that Marian is alive in Nannie Robson’s old cottage, rarely visited by her grandson, who believes himself cursed by his illegitimate origins and will not ask a cousin he loves to marry him.

Leo visits the elderly Marian. She tells him Marcus and Denys were both killed in the First World War, that Hugh married her and stood by her unflinchingly, and that her mother eventually had to leave the family home. Her composure cracks only when she speaks of her grandson’s absence. She begs Leo to act as postman one final time: to tell the young man that his origins were the product of genuine love, that no curse holds him, and that he should be free to marry. Moved despite his recognition of her self-deception, Leo decides to go through with the errand. As he drives through the lodge gates, the long-forgotten view of Brandham Hall rises suddenly before him.