“I quite understand,” said Jack’s mother, soothing.
“How can you…” The woman stood abruptly. Now Jack could see her better: a woman perhaps a handful of years older than himself, slim and pretty and fair, dressed plainly. “I—oh, curse you with rot.”
To Jack’s astonishment, she cradled a spell—faint, murky green—and flung it onto the table, where a tea service was laid. A dainty cake stand held a profusion of sandwiches, every one of which went an unpleasant blue-white as the spell coated the food with mould.
A surprised silence hung in the air. Into it the fair woman made a choked, aghast noise. “Your ladyship—” she said, and burst right into tears.
Jack contemplated sidling back out of the room.
His mother stood as well. She said, quite kindly, “Let’s try again next week, shall we, Margaret?”
Margaret hiccuped and gave a lurching nod-curtsy, then fled for the door where Jack stood. Her red, tearstained face was covered with her hands. She didn’t seem to register his existence as she exited.
Lady Cheetham sighed and turned the cake stand to inspect it. She cradled a general reversal. Food was a beast to manipulate with magic beyond heat and cold; Jack wasn’t surprised when half of the mould clung stubbornly despite the spell, along with a general unappetising shrivelling of everything. His mother sighed again, cradled a Server’s Bell, and touched her fingertips to the nearest pane of glass. The peal of a real bell sounded deep in the house.
Only then did she look her son frankly in the face.
“Well, Jack, my dear,” she said, “you do have impeccable timing.”
Jack crossed the room and kissed her cheek. It trembled only a little. “Polly.”
Her hair had greyed young and was now, in her sixties, almost entirely white. Her well-lined face was illuminated with pure emotion as she held his gaze. Mary Bastoke, now Mary Alston, Countess of Cheetham, known to her loved ones as Polly. Never beautiful, but always vibrant, as if born with an invisible guidelight burning inside.
“Who was that?” asked Jack.
“That was Margaret Oliver. The poor thing does have a temper. I wanted to ask how her Freddy is getting on in London—he writes to her, you know. Ah, Millie. Do have someone gather this up for the pigs—it’s not fit for the downstairs table, I’m afraid. And Lord Hawthorn will be accompanying me on my morning walk.”
The maid’s wide eyes fixed on Jack. He resisted the urge to bare his teeth and growl.
“Yes, my lady.”
Braced at every moment for questions, Jack followed his mother through a side door of the conservatory and to the stone-floored hallway that led out to the old gamekeeper’s pantry. A line of wooden pegs held a floppy, wide-brimmed hat and a sturdy apron, which his mother donned in silence. She swapped her house shoes for a pair of Wellington-style rubber boots.
Jack lost the battle with his own question.
“He writes to her, does he?”
His mother looked at him. A smile played around the corner of her mouth, though no guilt at all. “One letter, Jack. One letter, after all this time. You hadn’t let me do anything for you for years, and I suddenly had the chance to do you a favour with my reply.”
“Send me a valet who’d report back to you?”
She unlatched the heavy wooden door. Sunlight spilled across the stones. Jack raised a hand to shade his eyes.
“Write me more letters yourself, and I won’t have to rely on Freddy Oliver’s to his mother for news of you.”
“I’m not angry you sent me a spy.” Jack waited until they were halfway across the ivy-wreathed courtyard, which even in this heat smelled of the pond tucked in the corner, before he added: “I am a little angry you decided to send me a brother.”
In front of him, his mother’s back halted. She took a moment before turning.
“Ah.” She sounded close to laughter. “Is that why you’re here?”
Jack nodded. He didn’t mention the pointed prod from Lord Cheetham during the visit to Westminster. It had tipped the balance, but he’d been considering it before then.
The blue eyes he’d inherited regarded him thoughtfully, hungrily, from within his mother’s face. Other long-absent sons might have returned to angry shouts, or hysterical tears and embraces, or cold, punishing courtesy.
“How did you know?”
“He’s the spit of Father’s old portrait in the ballroom,” said Jack. “And that red hair. Just like Aunt Hetty and Christopher. He’s seventeen? It must have been—before.”
Before the secret-bind. Before Elsie died and the Hall’s land turned.
“Leo told me just before the boy was born.” Polly tucked her skirt higher as they stepped off the courtyard’s paving stones and onto a trodden-flat dirt path that began to slope down. They were doing the proper walk, then. Her voice was fond. “He’s always had a robust conscience.”
“Oliver himself doesn’t know.”
It wasn’t a question. Either Freddy Oliver had no clue he’d been fathered by Frederick Leonard Charles Alston, Earl of Cheetham, or he was wasted as a valet and should be on the stage.
“No, he doesn’t. Margaret changed her mind about telling him, once he was happy in service. She’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop, I believe—always thinking I’ll whisk her off to some dungeon out of jealous pique. She’s a nice girl, despite the temper. Superb nurse, Dr. Jenkins says.”
“Powerful, too.” Jack stepped around a series of puddles that muddied the path in a shadowy, insect-dense little wilderness; his mother, in her boots, tromped straight through. “That spell of rot. No wonder Oliver’s as strong as he is.”
“Too strong for the education he had,” said his mother bluntly. “I’d have stepped in sooner, if I’d realised. He needs someone to teach him control.”
“Yes,” Jack said dryly. “I have realised that.” He remembered being that age, brimming with magic freshly come to its full strength, taking all his lessons and practice to keep it leashed to his will. Again he felt compelled to point out: “I hired a magical valet, Polly. I didn’t take on responsibility for teaching magic to a half brother.”
That got him an unimpressed look over her shoulder. Jack’s heart, like an unoiled piece of clockwork, gave a grudging tick of love for his astoundingly pragmatic mother. She hadn’t kept on trying to change Jack’s mind when he abandoned magical society. She knew it would only push him further away. She’d simply left the door open.
In his more cynical moments over the years, Jack had tried to convince himself that he’d burned all the responsibility out of himself along with the instinctual actions of magic. That the ashes of it had been dumped somewhere in the dry veldt of the Boer, in that chill morning before he was transported back to England.
It wasn’t true. Even at the time, he’d known it. Jack had hated everything about the war except for the men who surrounded him, and you couldn’t shed responsibility in a place like that. It clung. It found the chambers of the heart and made a gritty home, which had been left vacant for years and then been all too willing—apparently—to welcome Maud Blyth and Violet Debenham.