Polly sent Jack a satisfied look as Oliver’s red hair bobbed away on a brief detour to the folly, a lurching stone hut with a dense thatched roof. It was indeed ringed with wild rosebushes clawing their way free of any attempt at order.
“You and the gardeners are outdoing yourselves,” Jack said.
“If this gala is to be a disaster, at least nobody will be able to say it wasn’t a beautiful one.”
As they neared the lake, other changes became visible. The land works from Jack’s previous visit had been smoothed out and completed; the balustraded terrace looking down onto the lake was now just the highest edge of a huge sprawl of vivid green lawn, dotted with neat stone-ringed islands of small olive trees and bright flowers. The land beneath the terrace, the entire northern edge of the lake, was now a sea grotto three times the height of the folly: a carved-out marvel of intricate dark stone, decorated with shells and rough mosaic tiles in shades of green and blue, like an undersea king’s palace in a picture book. A path of white stones wandered around the lake’s edge and then beneath a pink arch made to mimic coral, and into the depths of the grotto, from whence laughter could be heard.
Something bright ran across the lawn in Jack’s periphery. He turned in time to see a feathery tail like a dropped golden necklace vanish between trimmed hedges.
“What was that?” asked Oliver, joining them again.
“Leo said we should get golden partridges to complement the peacocks,” said Lady Cheetham. “He really should have specified that he was joking.”
Jack’s parents had been well suited—scions of well-born and extremely magical families—but had, he suspected, married more out of goodwill than grand passion. His father kept discreet mistresses and split his time between Cheetham and London. His mother ruled the Hall, absolute in her dedication to the estate she’d married and pledged her blood to.
And buying a flock of ornamental partridges that she knew perfectly well he’d never wanted was exactly the kind of joke that she’d consider to be a display of affection for her husband.
The white stones crunched beneath Jack’s boots, providing a warning of their approach, and the coral-arch of the grotto soon disgorged Robin and Edwin, both soaking wet and breathless with bathing flannels clinging to their bodies. Edwin in flannels looked like a tourist postcard designed expressly to make fun of the English, and his bare arms had already turned geranium-pink in the sun, but he was smiling. There was a darker pink mark at the side of his neck. Jack transferred his gaze firmly back to Robin.
“How d’you do, Hawthorn,” said the baronet in question. “If you’re looking for the girls, they went for a walk to dry off. I should warn you, Violet’s had five new ideas for illusions, ma’am,” he added to Polly. “At this rate you’ll be shipping her entire theatre troupe over from New York and installing them permanently on the grounds.”
“Don’t encourage her,” said Jack. He looked back at Edwin. The purple runes around Edwin’s wrist were gone. Edwin noticed him noticing and lifted the hand to twist back and forth.
“Thanks to your mother,” he said.
“I think young Edwin is disappointed in me,” Jack’s mother told him as they left Edwin and Robin behind and took a looping course back toward the Hall. “I had to tell him that we Bastokes have never gone in for keeping thorough records when it comes to runes. It never seemed all that important to me.”
“Give him a few hours and he’ll drag everything out of you and write it down himself,” said Jack.
“I think Mr. Courcey’s very kind,” said Oliver unexpectedly. “He’s always interested in what I have to say. He asked about Ma’s healing spells, and what kinds of magic were useful for valeting.”
Edwin’s magpie of a mind, always picking and collecting. A true interest in someone was a sort of kindness.
“He has some interesting theories about ley lines,” agreed Lady Cheetham. “Leo sent word of what happened to the Barrel, and Edwin told me how it happened.” She frowned at the toes of her boots. “I’ve always found the bond to the land very intuitive. And I suppose I’m used to it. It’s such an effort to do magic when I go to town, now.”
Intuitive. Jack turned that word around in his mind. Like most women of her generation, and even those today, Polly Bastoke would have been given far less formal training than her brother. Runes passed casually down in the family. Spells for the domestic sphere.
“Shall we talk to the bees?” asked Oliver. He answered himself by breaking into an eager almost-jog, heading towards the hives. Jack vaguely remembered having that much energy at that age.
His step faltered with realisation. “You introduced him to the bees? Or was that Leo?”
“It was me,” said Lady Cheetham. “It seemed … practical.”
“Then—he must know.”
Lady Cheetham shook her head. “He doesn’t know what it means. And it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“What do you mean, practical?”
Jack’s mother stopped walking. Jack pulled to a halt beside her, blinking away the sunlight.
“Jack,” she said levelly, “I will only say this once, and I don’t intend to apologise for it. Nor do I wish to hear any apology from you, given what I now know.”
Christ, there was a preface for you. Jack had the urge to loosen his knees and widen his stance, ready for a blow.
“We didn’t know if you would ever set foot here again.”
It hurt as much as he’d expected. She went on, “We had to plan for the possibility that you wouldn’t. Oh, you will inherit. No question of that. Beyond our family’s oath, there’s that little matter of an entailed earldom.” She smiled ruefully. “But you could be Earl of Cheetham from London—you could be Earl of Cheetham in the wilds of Argentina—and never come back here, and this place will need caretakers nonetheless. People who know it.”
An apology tried to bubble up. Jack caught it easily. He had years of experience refusing to apologise for his decisions.
Instead he said, with care—“I didn’t know if I would return either. It hurt, Polly.”
“I know.” She looked, for a moment, even older. “Does it still?”
They weren’t talking about grief, which was its own pain and kept its own house. Jack, his feet planted on the land of the Hall, finally forced himself to direct his attention to it. During his last visit he’d been so full of emotion it had been impossible to tell truly what was him and what was the land, and he’d refused to stop moving for long enough to disentangle it.
When Elsie died the pain had been even more tangled up, but even magicless Jack had been unable to escape it: the scream of a place where one of its heirs had died violently, died full of magic that had been twisted and wrong for a year. He’d been running from that violence, and the way it felt like a raw wound, as much as anything else.
For a moment it was like trying to wield a gun or direct a horse, having not done it for over a decade. The muscles responsible for this had lost their memory. It was laborious. And faint, once he fumbled for the knack; far fainter than it had ever been. But the land was there, singing soft, the trees and the dirt and the house itself. It sent a hot sharpness through his chest and up into his nose, the closest to outright tears he’d come in years. Nothing about it felt wrong.