A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(55)

Edwin cast a longing glance at the bookshelves and nearly asked to stay in the room and help. But he did want to inspect the maze, to see if he could glean anything more about this idea of twinning spells to plants as they grew.

“Mr. Courcey,” said Mrs. Sutton when they were almost out of the room. Edwin turned. She was sitting very straight, very proud. For an agonising moment she reminded Edwin of his own mother. “I’ll be interested to hear what you think of my plants. And don’t go into the maze, for heaven’s sake. I won’t have anyone else’s death on my conscience today.”

Edwin wondered if this was a joke. It didn’t appear so.

The grounds were even more obnoxiously lovely than they’d seemed from the car. Robin and Edwin didn’t encounter anyone else as they made their way towards the hedge maze in what must have looked like a comfortable, leisurely stroll. It didn’t feel comfortable. There was too much that could have been said; Edwin had no idea where to begin, and when he didn’t know what to say, he said nothing. Cowardly, he was hoping that Robin would take the plunge.

Robin had slung his linen jacket over one shoulder. He seemed very interested in the rose garden and the pretty wilderness that followed it, dotted with autumn colour and early berries and even some flower beds in bloom.

“What do you think?” Robin said eventually, nodding around them.

Edwin’s voice came out thistle-spiked. “I think if my name were Flora, I’d have avoided anything this obvious.”

Robin stopped. He was a few steps ahead, beneath a trellis archway of greenery. “This has rather shaken you up, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t,” snapped Edwin, throat scratched with guilt. “Don’t go being nice, how can you constantly be like this, when it’s your arm and your visions and someone else’s bloody mess—and I made it worse—and Reggie might be dead, and here we are dancing like sodding debutantes around the fact that you might be next, and who knows what—”

“Edwin. Shut up,” Robin suggested.

Edwin did, gratefully. He snagged two fingers through a gap in the trellis, sagging the weight of his arm there, trying to formulate an apology. Robin put his hand between Edwin’s shoulder blades, patted twice, then let it stay.

“I hope that wasn’t you trying to be comforting,” Robin said after a moment. “Because you’re dashed miserable at it, if so.”

Edwin made a small, pained noise that was trying to be a laugh, and let himself lean back into Robin’s palm. As a rule, he did not enjoy physical contact. It usually seemed an intrusion, or mistimed, or compounding whatever distress or insult or small condescension the touch had been meant to mitigate. He was still full of an off-balance ambivalence, a tingling awareness of Flora Sutton’s fingers on his cheeks.

It seemed completely bizarre that Robin could reach out and touch Edwin like this, a casual hand on his back, and it could be perfect. Just as the touch on his arm last night, over tea, had also been perfect. Exactly what he needed in that moment and had been unaware of needing.

Edwin pressed his lips together and made a memory of it: a small thing to store and bring out later, when Robin was safely back out of his life. Then he moved away.

“Come on,” he said. “I do want to look at this maze.”

Not that he could make more than a stab at knowing anything about the plants themselves—yew? was that what one made mazes from?—but he halted near the maze entrance and didn’t mind the immediate wrench of wrongness in his stomach. It was something to be studied, and that meant he could endure it.

“It doesn’t look easy to cheat,” Robin said admiringly. The maze was, indeed, dense and leafy and half as high again as either of them. Robin trailed his fingers along the outer hedge. “It looks square, from here—how far back do you think it goes? I’m going to try and walk around.”

His footsteps crunched away as Edwin cradled the same detection charm he’d used at the estate boundary, and crouched down. Given what Mrs. Sutton had said, he assumed he’d have a stronger sense of the spell the closer he was to the roots, though this kind of charm couldn’t hold a candle to a nice thorough spell notation.

Again he felt a warming tug of his hands. He hooked one portion of the string with an index finger and changed the angle, concentrating hard on the idea of visibility. His magic moved sluggishly, then more smoothly. If he knelt right down and peered underneath the lowest portion of the hedge, like someone seeking a dropped coin beneath a low sofa, he could see a faint pink pattern cobwebbing the trunk of the plant.

The gravel crunched again with footsteps and a shadow fell over Edwin’s hands. He shook the spell clear and began to straighten up.

“Honestly, all this has done is given me twenty more questions for the lady her—”

The blow came like a pendulum, sideways and fast. It knocked Edwin down when he was halfway to standing. He managed to catch himself on his hands, but struck the side of his forehead unpleasantly hard on the ground.

His head spun. His heart was thundering. His cheek was pressed into the gravel; there was dirt on his lip. He was staring at a pair of black shoes, well polished, soiled with dirt. For a long moment the surprise of the attack alone froze Edwin to the spot, lying sprawled on his stomach over his awkwardly bent arms, and then pain blossomed simultaneously in his scratched palms and the side of his head.