“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.
These days Edwin was splitting his time between Sutton, where magic still came easiest and he could devote his time to creating a variety of new techniques, and his permanent rooms in the Blyth house in London. He was busier than ever. The Magical Assembly had been split on whether to recruit the destroyer of the Barrel into the senior advisor post that his brother Walter had held, but Manraj and Kitty had gone around being devastatingly sensible at people until they had enough votes. If it had been hard to argue with Kitty when she was pregnant, it was nearly impossible when she was aggressively jiggling a baby.
Violet was spending a chunk of her fortune rebuilding Spinet House into something thankfully far more normal and far less anxiety-inducing to inhabit. Which would mean she could rent it out when she followed Maud to Cambridge later in the year, even though Violet herself had no intention of studying at a college. She and Maud spent half their time in ever-more-extravagant plans to create their own sort of female Bloomsbury set: a haven for girl magicians and artists and musicians and students.
Knowing them, they would pull it off with flair.
Alan, now lying flat on the blankets with his eyes closed—he’d kept himself and Jack awake long past midnight the previous night, exploring in detail a scenario for the latest Roman pamphlet, so it was really his own fault—also continued to split his time. He wrote society pieces for Tatler and concise commentary for the political pages of the Sphere, which currently showed a lot of illustrations of the ongoing debate in the Commons about curtailing the power of the Lords, following the rejection of Lloyd George’s budget.
Jack lifted his walking stick, concentrated, and sent a small nudge of magic at Alan. He’d always felt more comfortable using a physical object to fight with, and Edwin had uncovered for him some ancient Germanic texts on the use of wooden wands. This particular stick had been a Christmas gift from Violet. Hawthorn wood. Remarkably good for magic, as it turned out.
Alan didn’t open his eyes, but twitched and flicked his hand back in Jack’s direction. The magic sank into Jack’s chest with a pleasant fizz of sensation.
“Piss off, Jack,” said Alan, a smile playing on his lips.
“You haven’t asked me for a quote,” Jack said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll invent one for you too,” said Alan. He stifled a yawn and sat up, brushing petals from his waistcoat. “You had designs on the new Lady Blyth yourself and were furious when she turned down the opportunity to become the future Countess of Cheetham.”
“Wait,” said Adelaide. “I want to hear about this fictional proposal. I may yet change my mind.”