That did seem a mite disrespectful to the oak. Alan imagined Lady Dufay popping out from behind it with her most disapproving face. He laughed, breaking the kiss.
Jack winced as he straightened. “I should trade you in for a larger model. You’re too short for this.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. You’re too bloody tall.” Alan considered, then stepped up onto the branch just as Maud-as-Elsie had stood on the swing seat. He looked around. “Hm. I can see the appeal. Master of all you survey.”
“Turning class traitor after all, Cesare?”
Alan sniffed and tried to imitate Jack’s manner of lounging arrogantly even when fully upright.
“I am Lord Hawthorn, Liberal sympathiser and dues-paying member of the Reform Club. I believe in taxing my fellow wealthy men to educate the poor. And yet I have no quibbles with a system that means I own all of this”—he made a sweeping gesture around the estate—“while there are thousands of people in London—hell, tenants on my own land—who’ll never be able to stand on so much as a rickety chair and say they own the place where they live. Never for the full span of their lives.”
His heart beat hard into Jack’s silence. It was a relief to have found that anger there, still, and to have drawn it defiantly out into the light.
Class traitor. That had smarted more than Jack likely intended. No matter how Alan felt about this man, no matter how well matched their ideals and their minds and their sexual tastes, they were still straining to clasp hands over a chasm of vast injustice. Lord Hawthorn needed reminding of that. And so did Alan.
“Too much given to me without asking,” Jack said finally. “I concede the point, though will argue I have some quibbles. And I don’t know the best solution—if it’s law, or politics, or charity.”
“Or guillotines.”
A quick smile. “It was the point, in a way, of breaking the Last Contract. One object can’t be the key to all magic. But magic also can’t be about what land someone owns on paper, or it’s the few and the many all over again. And nobody owns ley lines or the magic they hold. It’s there for everyone to use, even if that’s not in such large ways as the contracted fae-magic.”
“Freezing an entire lake was fairly large,” said Alan dryly.
“That was because of being on this land, I think.” Jack nodded at the Lady’s Oak. “The true spells of power will continue to need magicians working together, perhaps even more than before, and that’s for the best. It should take agreement to achieve large things.”
Alan wasn’t sure what to say. He reached out and put his hand in Jack’s hair, as he’d done earlier and also—God, was it only the previous night? It felt like weeks ago already. Jack leaned into the touch with no change of expression. Alan had an odd jolt of pride and triumph left over from childhood, when he and Caro and Emilio would crowd around the milk cart while the man was unloading and shamelessly bribe the patient old mare with crumbs of sugar stolen from their pa’s stores. You had crowing rights all day if the horse’s soft nose chose your hand to press up against first.
Alan stored that comparison away for a future time when Jack needed his arrogance deflated.
“In the meantime,” said Jack, “as I am currently unable to divest myself of the land entailed to my future title, I can at least make it available to others.” He glanced up at Alan. “You’re welcome here at any time. Bring your whole family, if you wish. We’ve certainly room for them.”
Alan tried to imagine his ma’s horrified face at the Rossi clan being invited as houseguests to the Earl of Cheetham’s estate. He brimmed with appalled laughter. His hand fell from Jack’s hair and he lowered himself to sit again on the thick branch.
“I don’t think so.”
“And I’m sure Polly would take your sister Bella into service, once her child’s born and weaned. If I can manage to restrain myself from marrying her in the meantime.”
“She’d … what?”
“I’m told both of the Miss Rossis have excellent references,” said Jack blandly. “I mean it. You should ask her. Polly.”
“I should not.”
“Then I will.”
A trap. Alan glared. “Stop giving me things. It’s a terrible habit.”
“We Liberals are passionate about the redistribution of wealth.”
“Fuck right off,” said Alan, but he couldn’t fight the smile.
“You know what to say if you truly want me to stop.”
Oh, Christ. Wasn’t that well aimed. All those advantages, wealth and size and position—and now magic. Yet Alan had the power to deny Jack anything, simply by saying his name.
And, which was even more enormous again: Alan trusted that Jack would honour it.
Jack added, watching him carefully, “Nothing owing. I meant it. Anything between us will always be gifts freely exchanged. And I won’t give you a penny if you don’t want it, but my connections and my name—”
“Your knack for bullying innocent newspaper editors—”
A twitch of Jack’s mouth. “I want to see what you become when you’re given the space for it.”
It was another devastating nudge in the universe of Alan’s soul. I would take your heart within my ribs.
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.