A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(62)

Nobody said anything. Edwin moved closer; something was, indeed, peeking from the side of her clenched fingers. Robin turned the dead woman’s hand over and prised the fingers open, one by one. Then he snatched back his fingers as if they’d been burned, and shook them hastily.

Mrs. Sutton had died with a handful of silver. It was a necklace, the chain of it all looped and held secure beneath the pendant, which was a circular shape about the size of a half crown, with neat folds and blackened patterning.

“A rose,” Robin said.

“Ah, yes. It’s—an heirloom,” said Mrs. Greengage. Too loudly, and too quickly. She swept forward and bent to take the pendant. She, too, snatched back her fingers with a startled noise as soon as they came into contact with it.

Edwin lifted his hands to try another detection charm, in case that would provide any clues. There was no telling what kind of imbuement Mrs. Sutton might have laid on an object she was clutching at the time of her death. Then he remembered that he’d lost his cradling string, and that even if he managed to do without it in situations that weren’t driven by fear of death, he’d used up his magic. It would be hours yet before he could manage another spell.

Well, touching the rose didn’t seem to have caused harm. Just discomfort. And to magician and non-magician alike. Curious. Edwin considered asking them what they’d felt, but didn’t want his own observations tainted by what they said. They could compare notes afterwards.

Taking a deep breath, Edwin reached out.

“Edwin—” Robin started.

Edwin’s fingers made contact. His arm was tensed, ready to draw back, but . . . nothing happened.

No, that wasn’t right. Something was happening. The silver rose was warming beneath Edwin’s touch, and not just warming, but vibrating. A soft, subtle hum like the fall of horses’ hooves far down a road. He lifted the pendant clear and closed his fingers on it, letting the chain dangle, the hot buzz shivering right down to the bones of his hand. The sensation became jerky, as though it were trying to push itself in a particular direction.

“What’s it doing?” asked Robin.

Edwin snuck a look at Mrs. Greengage, whose expression had solidified into something between hostile and hopeful. She didn’t look like a likely source of information.

“I’m not sure,” Edwin said. “It feels like—there’s a hiding game, like this. It’s an easy charm. Hot and cold. Hotter is closer.” It didn’t explain why the charm hadn’t wanted anyone else to pick the pendant up, but Edwin wasn’t going to put it past a single item on this entire damned estate to be capricious at best, given its mistress.

He moved around the room with arm outstretched, letting the rose heat and cool and buzz more and less demandingly in his grasp. Soon enough it was obvious where it wanted to lead him: a tall mirror hung on one of the ivy-carved wood panels of the wall, large enough to show Edwin himself from hair to boots. He was mussed and scratched all over, unkempt as a boy come from climbing trees. The mirror’s frame was made of the same silver, and with the same design of roses, impeccably polished. There was no obvious place to put the pendant, no convenient empty space in the pattern where it could be nestled.

Edwin thought first of the stopped clocks. There was no mist on this mirror, at least. Then he thought of the illusion mirror that led to the back of Len Geiger’s shop, and reached out the hand containing the rose to touch the glass surface. His cheeks glowed with warmth like sunburn as his fingers brushed it, and for a moment there was something odd, something different, about his reflection.

Even as he tried to focus on it, the glass dissolved into nothing and left an empty space. A frame that could be stepped through. There was a much smaller room beyond, barely four paces to each dimension, with a small desk and a squat bookshelf.

Behind Edwin, it sounded as though all the domestic staff inhaled at once. He ignored them, because he could just see a name on one of the spines—was that Howson? A high step brought him into the room, where he skirted round the desk and crouched by the bookshelf. The lowest shelf was all notebooks bound in black leather with gold embossed dates—records, diaries?—but the top two were books, and what books. Treatises that Edwin had only ever heard of, names he’d never thought to see attached to printed works at all. A copy of the same Kinoshita he’d been so thrilled to pick up from Geiger’s; that gave him a stab of irrational annoyance.

“Mr. Courcey?” came from the room behind him.

With a sigh, Edwin stood again, climbed back out of the frame, and blinked. Every single person in the parlour was staring at him. Robin had taken a seat, legs sprawled tiredly. The maid had her hand to her mouth.

It dawned belatedly on Edwin that he’d just spent a good few minutes poring over a dead woman’s book collection while her corpse cooled and the question of her death still hung in the room like poisonous vapours.

“Er,” said Edwin. “Was it . . . common knowledge that this room was here?”

“Yes, sir,” said the butler, rather stiff.

“Ah. Good. I want to buy those books,” Edwin blurted. Then winced, mostly because Robin was wincing. Being a normal polite person was proving even more difficult than usual, buffeted as he was by the shocks of the day’s events and the tentacles of sheer intellectual greed that were telling him to snatch up Flora Sutton’s private library and never let it go. “Not that I’m saying—I don’t mean today—of course, it’ll be a question for whomever inherits the place.”