A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(46)

All right, he was coming around to the strong opinion that he didn’t like this crowd overmuch, but they were better than nothing. And even though he was smartly wary of Belinda Walcott’s games, he thought his chances of being shot at or drowned or swan-mauled were fairly low, indoors.

The parlour was a striking room even by the standards of Penhallick House. The Morris paper on the walls held a dense pattern of leaves and clusters of flowers in red and blue and yellow, woven through with thorny tendrils studded with tinier flowers in startling white. It filled the walls in wide panels between dark, carved wood that stretched from the floor and formed arching ribs where it met the ceiling. There were shelves cunningly set into the wall to show off books or glasswork or panels of mosaic. Plants grew from enormous brass pots; rugs formed a rough chessboard over the floor. The furniture was slender and upholstered in cloth embroidered to within an inch of its life, and most of the chairs had fabric flung over them to create yet more contrasts of pattern.

There were almost no paintings. Robin felt a brief, unexpected pang of longing for his own family’s house in London, but banished it. This room didn’t need paintings. It would have smothered them. It was almost too much even on its own—almost, but not quite. Robin had no doubt that you could scrape twenty people off the street and most of them would proclaim this entire endeavour to be in ludicrously bad taste, but he adored it. It was jubilant and restorative. It was impossible to feel colourless, surrounded by so much colour.

Robin turned away from inspecting the nearest shelf to acknowledge Billy’s greeting, and stopped.

There was a motorcar parked in the middle of the room. It had not been there when he entered; Robin was reasonably certain that even he would have noticed a car before the wallpaper. But there it was, gleaming innocently from tyres to top, as though a country house’s parlour were a normal showroom.

Trudie smirked and walked through the car, towards him. Watching the dark-green bulk of metal swallow her to the collarbones made Robin’s stomach squirm, but she emerged unscathed as though from mist. “We’re playing at illusions,” she said, waving a glass of sherry. “Charlie’s got such a knack for them. Doesn’t it just look as though it’s about to speed into the fireplace?” Her dark gaze was full of an expectant amusement that seemed to say she was waiting for Robin to entertain her—or rather, for something entertaining to happen to him.

Robin nodded his admiration of Charlie’s work, but didn’t move to join the group. Instead he wandered over to where Edwin was seated in a kind of nook formed by sofas. Edwin had removed his necktie and his dinner jacket. Robin knew enough now to guess that the small green jars dotting the room’s low tables contained the group’s decanted guidelights, but Edwin’s was loose, hovering above his shoulder. The reason was obvious: Edwin had a book in his lap. He was also taking notes, the unmagical way. Robin failed to dredge up the tiniest scrap of surprise.

The cigarette in Edwin’s other hand was another story. Robin enjoyed the drooping angle of it, the casual pinch of Edwin’s fingers.

“You smoke?” was Robin’s greeting.

“Only in company,” said Edwin. He correctly read Robin’s surprise and went on, almost amused. “Yes. Indeed. Not often.”

“Give us one, then,” said Robin, settling himself on the nearest ottoman.

Edwin blinked and held out a carton. Robin pulled his gold lighter from his pocket and lit up. It had been long enough that the first taste of smoke made him cough.

“I thought you said you’d given it up,” said Edwin.

“I did. I don’t smoke.” Robin smiled at him. “Apart from sometimes. In company.”

Edwin’s eyes strayed back to the lighter, which Robin tossed in his hand. “It was a gift from Maud, when I sat my second Tripos. For luck.”

Edwin’s tiny smile flickered at the side of his mouth. He took a drag from his cigarette as though to banish it, and looked back at his book.

Robin opened his mouth to suggest that Edwin could give himself a night off research, but closed it again, silenced by the twin realisations that Edwin still felt guilty about his failure to lift the curse today, and that Edwin wanted the excuse not to join in the parlour games.

Edwin said, without looking up, “Actually, this one’s a history of the magical families of Cambridgeshire. It’s recent and atrociously pompous and full of spiteful digs at the author’s distant cousins. But it’s the only thing in the library that might tell us something about the Suttons.”

Robin felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire, which was crackling away within a deep tiled recess. Edwin’s wry, professorial humour was something that Robin didn’t think many people were allowed to see.

It was Miggsy’s turn in the illusion game when Robin next looked up. He extended a hand to help Belinda out of the chair where she sat, and cradled a spell. The chair filled at once with a gauzy version of Belinda herself, leaning sideways to laugh at something.

“I say, that’s neat.”

Edwin followed his gaze. “That’s an echo, not a constructed illusion. It’s a fiendishly fiddly spell, but if you cast it over a chair and define the time as five minutes ago, it’ll show you who was sitting there.”

Robin’s mind filled instantly with penny dreadfuls and police stories. “You could catch a few criminals that way, wouldn’t you think?”