He said, not letting himself overthink it, “You turned out very decent, considering how they probably treated you.”
“They didn’t,” said Robin. “Nothing like the way your father spoke about you the first night here. They were cruel to other people, but . . . I honestly think they saw us, me and Maud, as something like that man you cut out of paper. An extension of them.” He spoke as though piecing the thought together for the first time. “Things to be moved around in whatever way would make them appear in the best light. We had to be real to one another, because I don’t think we were real to them.”
Edwin touched the back of Robin’s other hand with his fingertips. He felt painfully awkward. He’d never had the knack of knowing how, why, when to extend this kind of touch. But Robin, of course, made it easy: he turned his hand up and clasped Edwin’s in his own, squeezing it.
“That sounds awful.”
“It wasn’t . . .” Robin’s grip tightened past pain. Relaxed. His next laugh was off-balance. “All right. Yes. It was bloody awful. And I always thought one day I’d turn around and tell them what I thought of them, and now—now I can add on top of it the fact that they didn’t even try to plan for our futures; they let the estate be mismanaged in whatever way would let them spend more on their parties and paintings, and give the biggest and most obvious donations to the charity of the moment. And now—we’re here. Nobody’s going to give Maudie a scholarship to Cambridge, and I’m not nearly smart enough to turn things around in a hurry, but nobody else is going to do it, and I’m so . . .”
It wasn’t a broken heart. It was more like broken glass: a bottle, smashed, letting everything flow out from where it had been long corked and fermenting. Robin was gazing far past Edwin, into the future.
“Scared,” said Edwin.
So there it was. He’d found the thing that scared Robin Blyth.
“Yes,” said Robin.
Lunch was served not long after, and by the time the last course had been removed the rain was heavier than ever. Bel sighed and abandoned the idea of boating, then allowed Charlie to talk her and Trudie into a walk around the grounds, so long as he promised not to let a drop through the umbrella-spell.
Edwin, fortified by roast beef and syllabub, took Maud Blyth to meet his mother. She managed a cheerful greeting and smiled with honest delight when Maud, who one-on-one had Robin’s knack for society manners—paper men, Edwin thought, and it soured the moment—complimented her hairstyle and the lace at her collar.
“Annie’s gifts are wasted out here in the country,” Florence Courcey said, splitting her approving look between Maud and the maid. Annie sat tucked in the corner cleaning spots from ribbons and sashes. She blotted them with a rag dipped in a bottle, then cast a simple version of the dissolution spell that Edwin had thought might work on the curse. “She should be attached to someone who’s going out visiting every day, where her handiwork can be seen and admired.”
His mother was sitting stiffly, not moving with ease. She was exerting herself on his behalf, spending energy she didn’t have, like a gambler refusing to rise from the table. Edwin caught Robin’s eye, and Robin made polite noises about letting Edwin and his mother exchange news in private, and took Maud out of the room.
Annie brought over a tonic as soon as the Blyths had left. Edwin’s mother closed her eyes and let discomfort make a mess of her features while Annie adjusted her cushions.
“I’m sorry, Edwin, darling,” she said. “I did think I might be more myself, after a good sleep.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Edwin. “I’m tiring you, I won’t stay long. But I have another secret for you.” He drew up a chair to sit on, trying to work out the easiest shape of the story. “This one’s awfully large.”
“That’s all for now, Annie.” His mother dismissed the maid with a nod. Her eyes were already brighter, though it was a brittle brightness: another coin laid down that she’d have to account for later. Her anxious look scanned his face. Edwin kept forgetting the scratches there, except when they itched. “What is it, darling? Is this about—did I hear you had an argument with a hedge?” Of course that had already whispered its way back to her, through Annie’s army of gossips.
“You know we went to Sutton Cottage,” said Edwin, and let the story pour out from there. He underplayed the danger they’d been in, not wanting to worry her, making the hedge maze and its antipathy for magicians seem more like one of Bel’s pranks. It probably made it sound pathetic, that he’d gone as far as trying to make blood-pledge with someone else’s property in order to escape, but that couldn’t be helped.
“Sutton Cottage,” his mother breathed. “I knew it was old, but . . . Nobody I know has been there, not since Gerald Sutton passed away.”
“No, it’s warded,” said Edwin, and wondered for the first time if that was entirely due to Flora Sutton’s desire to guard her piece of the contract, or if she’d had other reasons to want her fellow magicians to leave her in peace. It wasn’t as though Edwin couldn’t see the appeal. He’d worn string-scrapes on his fingers as a child, and tired his eyes with reading, trying to find a ward that could be set on his own bedroom door and keep certain parts of the world at bay.
The world, meaning Walt.
“You really think it’s that powerful, darling?”
“Yes.” Edwin caught the yawn from his mother, and the aches of the previous day’s exertions settled back into his shoulders. “It’s nothing like Penhallick, Mother. It felt like if I stood there long enough, it would pull parts of me into the soil like roots.” He hadn’t meant to let that out, but the uneasy whimsy slid off his mother’s attention. “And I’m wrong for it. I think Mrs. Sutton grew half those gardens from magic, and God knows I haven’t enough to maintain them, or to have the slightest clue how she did it in the first place. It’s just going to be something else for me to disappoint. And after all that, I still haven’t managed to do anything about the curse on Robin.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said. “And I’m sorry about the Gatling boy. Sounds like such a nasty business, darling. Once you’ve sorted out Sir Robert’s problem, I hope you can keep yourself well clear of it.”
Edwin wanted to agree with her. He thought about Flora Sutton’s blue needling stare, and her hands branding his cheeks with her expectations. He thought about the sheer affronted anger that had sprung to life in his belly when he was shoved into the hedge maze. It was, he realised with a start, still there: an ember smouldering away beneath the ash of fear and futility.
He stood and kissed his mother’s cheek, and went to hide in the library again until dinnertime. Robin didn’t seek him out, this time. Edwin told himself he was glad.
He dressed slowly for dinner, listening for the sounds of Robin getting ready in the room across the hall. He couldn’t hear any: the doors were good wood. The walls were reasonably thick.
He was listening so hard that the knock on his door seemed abnormally loud.
“Cuff links,” said Robin when the door was opened. He was juggling them in one hand. “Do you mind?”
It was a transparent excuse. Edwin managed not to smile as he let Robin in, and managed not to smile as he fastened the cuff links for Robin, and managed not to smile as Robin sat on the edge of Edwin’s bed and looked in every corner for inspiration before finding, somewhere in the wainscoting, the idea of inquiring if Mrs. Courcey’s health had taken a turn for the better.
“Perhaps. She has ups and downs.”