A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(29)

“You should have told me about this,” Edwin snapped. “A curse that makes you have visions—that’s a detail. That could be vital. How am I supposed to learn how to counteract it when you’re withholding information?”

Robin glared at him. “No matter how many times we call one another by friendly names, Edwin, I don’t know you. I didn’t know if I could trust you. I still don’t.”

Edwin stared back. “You . . . came here.” Hardly eloquent, but Robin seemed to take his meaning.

“Yes. I am here, aren’t I? In a house full of strangers who can do magic, when the last magical strangers I met put this on me.”

That was a fair point. Edwin was momentarily startled at the fear crowding in Robin’s eyes, behind the anger; then he was startled that this was the first time he’d seen it. Stubborn sportsman Robin Blyth. Physical courage he clearly had in handfuls, but this was something else. Edwin swallowed a wash of guilt and climbed to his feet, feeling his own fatigue seep through him as he did so.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll start my research in the morning.”

Robin nodded, shoulders slumping. He rolled his head on his neck where he sat, eyes falling closed, elbows resting on solid spread thighs. A few strands of hair rebelled against their slick styling and fell over his forehead.

Edwin bit the inside of his own mouth and turned away. He could allow himself these slips as long as they stayed firmly inside his own head. Tomorrow he would do what he always did with problems: he would hurl himself at books and interrogate them until they rendered up the solution. He would work this all out; he would let Robin wake up from this bad dream. And then Edwin’s life, too, would settle back to normal.





The breakfast room contained the smells of buttered toast and sausages. It also contained Trudie Davenport and Charlie Walcott, Trudie spooning sugar into tea while Charlie talked and stroked his moustache simultaneously. They both looked up when Robin entered.

“Sir Robin!” said Charlie heartily. “Slept well, I hope?”

As cold-plunge informality went, Robin reflected, that was a middle ground he could live with.

“Very well,” he said. “Good morning, Miss Davenport.”

She flicked a look at him that was flirtatious in an impersonal way, a pole thrust out to test the depth of a puddle. “Trudie. I insist.”

Her teaspoon stirred the cup with a rattling clink, and without any help from her. Belinda’s Cupid game had been a spectacular introduction, but not, it seemed, characteristic. Most of the magic here was smaller, more offhand, completely enmeshed in the lives of the people.

And all of it hidden. There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of country houses and townhouses where the magic was like this, kept inside walls or within the bounds of the estate, just another secret moving like a minnow beneath the surface of society and flashing a fin only where necessary. National interest. Briefings to the PM, like the one Robin had done earlier that week, where Asquith—with his long nose and hooded eyes—had looked as though nothing had ever surprised him, nor ever could.

And yet there was a word for magic’s revelation to the unenlightened. As though one were Saul on the road to Damascus.

Robin piled up a plate of food from the covered silver dishes at the sideboard. He ate at a faster pace than his digestion usually agreed with, and nodded along as he was informed that Mr. Courcey and Walter had already left in order to catch the first train back to London, and that the other members of the party were yet to show their faces.

“Aside from Win,” said Trudie. “The servants were already taking tea into the library when I came downstairs.”

“Some people don’t feel social at breakfast,” said Robin.

“Some people were born without a social bone in their body,” said Trudie.

It was momentarily difficult for Robin to keep his expression pleasant, hearing this echo of Walter’s dig at Edwin the night before. Robin hadn’t known quite what to make of Edwin’s brother. Everyone else had deferred to him, but it was more than the usual deference to a favoured and charismatic eldest son. There had been a strange, balancing-act tension in the air that casual sibling animosity couldn’t explain. It had put Robin’s teeth on edge, and it was a relief to know that Walt wouldn’t be a regular member of the house party.

“Bel’s leaving everyone to their own devices this morning, but she’ll insist you both join us for boating on the lake after lunch,” Charlie said to Robin.

“I don’t know if we’ll be—” Robin started, but Charlie said, “Nonsense!” and turned back to his bowl of kedgeree.

Robin swallowed half a cup of tea in two gulps, winced at the spasm of complaint in his throat, and murmured something noncommittal as he escaped the breakfast room.

When he found the library, he stopped a few feet inside the door in order to stare. He’d been in manor-house libraries before. Even Thornley Hill had a modest one, and he’d been envisaging something like that: a room stuffy with dust and gloomy with solid last-century furnishings, shelves packed with matching sets of untouched leather-bound books.

The library at Penhallick House was two storeys high, with a narrow balcony running along the two walls that were lined with bookcases stretching from the floor to the ceiling. Another wall held arch-topped windows, their curtains caught at the waists to allow morning light to spill into the room. A single rug was set well back from the fireplace that dominated the final wall, a mouth of wrought iron surrounded by tiles patterned with white vines on vivid orange. The rest of the floor was an intricate and angular pattern of inlaid wood, blond and amber-brown shades set at angles to one another, crawling in regular lines from one wall to the next.