Jack didn’t have a response that didn’t prove Alan’s point. He said nothing as Alan came and stood nearby, hands behind his back, to watch the hives curiously.
“Do they talk back?” Alan asked. “Oh—sod off, I don’t know. I’m past assuming anything in this place.”
“No, they don’t,” said Jack. “You talk to them. Give them your news. Elsie and I were introduced to the bees in the hour we were born.”
“Oh.” Alan leaned warily away as a bee came near his face. He glanced at Jack. “Introduce me, then.”
It was somehow exactly the right thing to say. Jack bowed shallowly towards the hives and Alan, a beat behind, did the same.
“Hives and queens of Cheetham Hall,” said Jack. “This is Alanzo Cesare Rossi, the bane of my existence.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Alan. He made a motion of doffing the cap he wasn’t wearing. “Sorry about your master’s dreadful manners. Bane. They’ll sting me to death at that rate.”
“They’re connected to the land. They know who I consider my real enemies.”
Alan’s shoulders relaxed. He allowed a bee to crawl on his trousers and didn’t brush it away.
Then he said, abrupt, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Not really. But not talking hadn’t helped either.
“What would you do, in my position?” Jack said. “Would you take Maud up on her offer?”
“I’m not in your position,” said Alan. “Never will be. But I’d give anything to talk to my pa again.”
“How did he die?”
“Pneumonia.”
“Was it fast?”
A hint of hostility painted Alan’s features. It was almost a relief to see something so familiar. “Fast enough.”
“Mrs. Navenby’s ghost was exactly how she was at the moment of her death. Same memories, same personality,” said Jack. Now that he was talking, his doubts were firing themselves into the air like clay pigeons. He took aim one by one. “And she died suddenly, by magic. You have no idea what Elsie was like before she died. She’d been fighting the pain so long there was hardly anything left of her. And Mrs. Navenby said that to exist as a ghost, without a medium, was like being asleep. What if we wake her up, and she’s in the same pain as before, and I’m the one forcing her through it?”
“And what if Maud can give her a voice, when otherwise she never would have had one?”
That was more than something to shoot. Jack’s voice flattened to sheet metal.
“Don’t try to manipulate me. Don’t fucking presume. You didn’t know my sister. You don’t know what she’d want.”
“Neither do you,” Alan shot back, “until you ask.”
“What do you care?” Jack snarled. A scream rang in his skull. For nearly a year he had let himself be dragged back into magic, back into this world, and now he wished he’d had Robin and Edwin thrown out of his townhouse before they could ever wave a curse in his face. “What gain is there for you, Alan Ross, to see this happen? There must be something. You said that philosophically you’d like me on my knees. So you’re doing your best to drive me there, is that it?”
Silence followed. Even the hum of the bees seemed softer than before.
Fight! that scream in Jack wanted to burst out. You said you’d enjoy it. Fight me! He could see the fight in the deepening creases beside Alan’s nose, in the lift of that sharp chin, and he thirsted for it.
He watched it rise and watched it dissolve.
“Go to hell,” said Alan quietly, and walked away.
* * *
Jack made it another day before he broke.
It wasn’t a conversation that did it. Everyone avoided him; Alan must have warned them off. Or else they figured, rightly, that if Jack could send even Alan retreating in anger then nobody else had a hope of a civil exchange. Jack collapsed into the relative silence with relief. This was how he’d spent the last decade of his life, after all: content with his own company, pleased to have a wide circle of unmagical colleagues and acquaintances but steering clear of the abrasive intimacy of family.
He took his meals on his own and went for long rides to inspect the Hawthorn areas of the estate, or for walks that deliberately avoided the route that his mother took.
He felt like a hollow log. If someone struck him he would ring with pain.
Returning from one of those walks, he saw Edwin and Violet, with Dufay and Lady Cheetham, standing beneath the Lady’s Oak. The gala would take place tomorrow.
Jack rubbed a frustrated hand back and forth across the grain of his jaw. His anger had run nearly dry, and his inherited pragmatism was rising to fill its space. The others had been indulging him, giving him time, and now that time was up. Edwin would need him tomorrow. His mother would need him. And there was no way of telling what the world of British magic, or any of their lives, would look like after that.
George’s visit had shaken something loose, and the space that Jack had been granted had allowed that something to settle into place to be inspected. Like his cousin, Jack had grown up thinking about his magic as something deserved—far more so than even his title and his wealth, which his politics had gradually led him to accept were representative of a fundamental flaw in any society that claimed to respect the humanity and wellbeing of all its members.
He had believed magic—his strong, wonderful, wild magic—to be his absolute birthright. It was why he’d been so angry when it was taken from him.
But perhaps nobody deserved to inherit this power either. Especially if they couldn’t prove they’d wield it well. Mine to tend and mine to mend. It was there, the old bargain, but it had shrunk down to hide in words spoken only by landowners.
Alan would have something to say about that, Jack was sure.
And if Jack was going to accept the Last Contract onto this land in a new form, if he agreed to inherit more than just the title of Cheetham, then he needed to fully accept each piece of his past. And work, like his parents had, towards forgiveness.
His next step felt lighter.
He walked back to the Hall and found Maud, and said, “Yes. I want to speak with her, if you can make it happen.”
If it had been a matter of speaking directly to a ghost, with no human medium in between, Jack might have been tempted to do it alone. Or at least with only his mother present. But asking Maud to keep secrets from Violet and Robin, to leave her without anyone to talk to about whatever might happen, was a step too unfair. They were all about to see this affair to its end. They deserved to hear how it had begun.
Enough secrets, enough silence, had been enforced around this already.
The high stone wall enclosed a square patch of lawn, well kept, ringed on all sides by a narrow bed of squat rosebushes. In the centre of the lawn was a large wooden swing seat, which Jack realised had been moved from its previous location beside a creek running along the southern border of the estate. One of Elsie’s favourite haunts.
Jack caught the word in his mind and winced.
There were no other seats. Everyone sat, without a murmur, on the grass.
Everyone except Jack and Lady Cheetham, who remained standing, and Maud, who walked without ceremony to sit on the edge of the swing seat. She was a lot shorter than Elsie had been. Her toes barely brushed the grass.