A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(63)

A choked giggle came from the maid. The butler and housekeeper exchanged a look that contained encyclopaedias and also, somehow, an argument. Edwin didn’t know who won it, but it was the butler who took a fraction of a step forward and coughed. He was a tall man with greying fair hair receding back from a high forehead.

“I’m afraid I’m not as familiar with the connections between the families of the area as I should be, sir,” he said in a tone that implied the opposite. “Did you say you were here to see Mrs. Sutton on family business? Are you a relation of the Suttons?”

“No, not at all,” said Edwin. “I know her—knew her”—God, the amount of past tense in this entire situation was horrifying—“great-nephew. Reginald Gatling.”

Another information-dense look was exchanged.

“The Rose Study,” said the butler, with impeccably enunciated capitals, “is one of those parts of the house which respond only to the owners and their heirs. So you see the purpose of my question. Sir.”

“What are you implying?” said Robin, sharply.

Edwin shook his head. Much as he would have simultaneously loved and hated to believe his father was not his father—and there had been times in his childhood when the sheer prospect of being only half-related to Walt by birth would have made him forgive his mother any amount of straying from the marriage bed—there was too much resemblance to hope for that.

“I’m not—” he said, then stopped. A different sort of impossibility bubbled up and presented itself to the part of his mind that was always looking to make sense of the senseless.

Surely not. Surely.

“What is it?” asked Robin.

Edwin looked from one of the servants to the other. It took all the courage he had never possessed to say the next words. “I made blood-pledge. With the ground beneath the hedge maze, to stop it from attacking us.” He swallowed hard. “I thought it would just be the maze, I thought—honestly, I didn’t think it would work at all.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but you should touch the mirror again,” said the maid.

“Mina,” said Mrs. Greengage, sharp.

Edwin turned and did so, with the hand not holding the pendant. The illusion of glass was back in place. It wavered, as if unsure what Edwin wanted, then held. Edwin’s face heated again and this time he saw on his reflection what he’d barely glimpsed last time: the flush of blood in his cheeks, over which the white marks of two hands stood out like tracks in snow.

One hand on each cheek, exactly where she’d laid them. An affinity, she’d said.

Edwin spun and stared at the corpse of Flora Sutton. Slowly, he felt the marks fade.

“I . . . don’t understand,” said Robin.

“Neither do I,” said Edwin. Thin hysteria was frothing in the back of his mouth. He managed to choke it back with a laugh. “It should have refused me. If it’d had any sense . . .”

Sense. As if an estate were a rational being, which would make conscious decisions or be argued with. As far as Sutton Cottage was concerned, Edwin had planted his blood in the soil and wildly sworn himself to as much of the land as would have him, on an estate far more magical than he himself had ever been, in the moment when its mistress had just died without heirs and in the hour after she’d laid her hands on his cheeks. The maze hadn’t settled because it was trying to protect Robin; Robin had never been its target in the first place. It had settled because it was refusing to harm Edwin.

From somewhere in the house came a dull knock, followed by the sound of a bell. “That’ll be the doctor,” said the butler, and vanished from the parlour.

“Edwin,” said Robin. He had that storm-soaked look on his face again, the one that meant he was coming to the end of his store of credulity for one day. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Oh, nothing of consequence,” said Edwin. “I’ve merely inherited one of the oldest magical estates in Cambridgeshire.”





By the time the doctor left it was close to dinnertime, and the prospect of driving all the way back to Penhallick in the dark was something neither Robin nor Edwin felt up to facing. The household offered to make up rooms for them to sleep in.

“It might be easiest,” Robin said. “It’d be a game to explain why we look like we’ve been dragged behind horses through a briar-patch, if we went to an inn somewhere closer.”

“You could show them your calling card,” said Edwin, but it came out of the shallows of his mind, murmured and barely meant. By now he was a bundle of pains, of bodily exhaustion and leftover nausea, of feeling simultaneously emptied of magic and as though a magic not his own was pressing around him, eager and impatient, demanding recognition. It was nothing he’d ever felt before and he would have preferred to escape it. To step back across that line of trees and be normal once more. He felt irrationally as though if he slept at Sutton Cottage he’d wake up woven into the wallpaper.

But Robin looked just as tired as Edwin felt. And a core of Edwin managing to make itself heard beneath the fear was saying that Edwin had entered into contract, no matter how impulsively, and abandoning the land before the sun had set on that contract would be . . . rude? Impolitic?

Unhallowed. The word swam up and laid itself like an oil-sheen over the waves of Edwin’s exhaustion.