Alan was the one whose job it was to put words around passion, and here he was being put to shame by an aristocrat. He had no idea how to speak aloud, to a real person, thoughts and feelings that were so real they terrified him.
Wrapping them up in Italian had been the best he could manage. I would write you into immortality. I would trap you in ink and wear the pages next to my skin until they fell apart. Kiss me until I know you. Kiss me until you know me, and unmake me, and love me anyway.
He touched Jack’s mouth, instead: a single thumb run across the seam. Heat prickled hard in his nose.
“Oh, is that all,” he said unsteadily. “Gifts freely exchanged? What the hell am I supposed to gift you, Lord Hawthorn? You don’t need anything.”
Jack’s outstretched legs cast shadows in the lamplight that were even longer again. Night birds called close by. Past the dense leaves of the oak the sky still frothed with moonshine and stars.
Jack had followed Alan’s gaze outwards to the sprawl of the world. He didn’t look back again, but he put his hand over Alan’s where it lay on the mossy bark of the tree. Not heavily. Alan could pull himself free at any time.
“Yes, I do,” said Jack.
EPILOGUE
“If I had to choose a moment,” said Robin, “I would say that I decided on Adelaide as the future partner of my life when she first realised I wasn’t a magician and looked at me as if I were a particularly unintelligent species of dormouse.”
Adelaide beamed and shook sandwich crumbs from her gloves. “For myself, I can’t decide whether it was Sir Robert’s mound of unpaid debts or his complete lack of interest in women which I found more appealing in a husband.”
Violet choked on a mouthful of sandwich.
Jack, currently engaged in brushing fallen petals and raindrops from the top of his silk hat, glanced up to catch the look on Alan’s face. Alan was looking both delectable and annoyed, as he always did in formal garb. A few tiny white petals had caught in his curls.
“Thank you,” Alan said, tucking his notebook away unopened. “How touching. My wedding gift to you will be completely ignoring everything you just said and inventing some appropriate quotes for the article.”
“Make sure to mention the dress,” said Adelaide.
Alan gave her a long-suffering look. “That’s why you had to stand around so long for Danny and his camera. If there’s anything Tatler’s readership cares more about than how many titles were in attendance, it’s what the dress looked like. Along with a reliable rumour about how much it cost.”
“How vulgar,” said Adelaide cheerfully. “Please invent a disgusting sum for that too.”
With no female relatives currently drawing on his purse, Jack hadn’t the faintest clue how expensive said dress might be. It was certainly impressive to look at. More and more women were choosing to be married in white, like the late queen, but the freshly minted Lady Blyth had chosen a pale gold that glowed against her brown skin, with enough ruching and lace to satisfy even Tatler’s hungry fashion pages, and a layer of red silk around the hem of the skirt that had been part of her mother’s wedding sari.
It was April, and the grounds of Thornley Hill looked greatly relieved to be passing into the colours of spring. The seat of Robin’s baronetcy was a small but remarkably handsome house in a pleasant corner of Kent, and Robin and Adelaide’s wedding dinner was the first event it had been called upon to host for nearly a decade.
The newlyweds themselves had declared their intention to spend some quiet time together on the grounds before dinner, and daringly vanished with a bottle of champagne and orders delivered via Maud for a select group of people to meet them in the apple orchard.
Orchard was a kind word for the untidy cluster of trees. But the blossoms were wearing all the white that Adelaide wasn’t, and there were oiled blankets laid on the damp ground—it had rained all through the morning—and a large platter of sandwiches under linen cloth, which Adelaide had fallen on with a famished sound.
“That reminds me. You haven’t given us a wedding gift yet, Edwin,” said Adelaide.
Edwin shrugged. He looked at ease, sitting close to Robin on the blanket, a sense of laughter lurking beneath the surface of his expression as there had been all day.
“Unless it’s to be a pile of books you’ve no interest in, I’m waiting for you to request something,” he said.
“Make me a snowflake,” said Robin.
Some of the laughter found its way onto Edwin’s mouth, and then out into the air. Even now, Jack could count on one hand the number of times he’d heard Edwin Courcey laugh.
“All right,” said Edwin.
Edwin seldom used string for spells these days. He still worked slowly, and with concentration and care, and he still preferred gesture as a way to focus his mind. Most British magicians did.
Many were finding other ways, which suited them better.
The snowflake began as a small cloud of mist, hovering off to the side of the blankets. And then it grew. And grew and grew. Watching it create itself, layer after layer of patterned ice, put Jack in mind of watching a cathedral being built.
Maud herself, never one to sit still when there was an alternative, had been wandering dryadlike between the apple trees, occasionally drifting back to Violet to touch her hair or steal a bit of sandwich or continue a private joke. When the snowflake had reached her own height, she stepped up to it and stroked one glittering point with a fingertip.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Violet—”
“No, darling.”
Maud’s huge green eyes turned onto Violet. None of them was entirely immune to Maud when she was putting effort into it, but Violet had more practice than most.
“But you don’t—”
“Yes, I do. And no.”
“Even if it’s only an illusion…?”
“We’ve only just emerged from winter,” said Violet. “I am sick to death of snow and cold, and don’t need to create a room full of it in the house, illusion or not. Ask me again in the middle of summer.”
“I’d’ve thought we’d all had enough ice for a lifetime,” said Alan. “Emily and Tom wanted to drag me ice-skating at Christmas, and I pretended to have a terrible flu.”
“You’re all terrible ingrates with no appreciation for beauty, and it’s my snowflake,” said Robin. “And I think it’s marvellous.”
Edwin smiled. After a moment, he leaned in and kissed Robin: quick and light, but with the rest of them looking on. That, too, was new. But today, of all days, it had a sense of staking a claim.