Robin weathered the direct stare through the second pair of glasses, first at his face and then at the bared curse.
“Hmm,” was Mrs. Sutton’s verdict, a full minute later. “You boys will take tea with me in an hour. Go for a walk—go and see the grounds, while you’re here. I will need to read a few things.”
Edwin cast a longing glance at the bookshelves and nearly asked to stay in the room and help. But he did want to inspect the maze, to see if he could glean anything more about this idea of twinning spells to plants as they grew.
“Mr. Courcey,” said Mrs. Sutton when they were almost out of the room. Edwin turned. She was sitting very straight, very proud. For an agonising moment she reminded Edwin of his own mother. “I’ll be interested to hear what you think of my plants. And don’t go into the maze, for heaven’s sake. I won’t have anyone else’s death on my conscience today.”
Edwin wondered if this was a joke. It didn’t appear so.
The grounds were even more obnoxiously lovely than they’d seemed from the car. Robin and Edwin didn’t encounter anyone else as they made their way towards the hedge maze in what must have looked like a comfortable, leisurely stroll. It didn’t feel comfortable. There was too much that could have been said; Edwin had no idea where to begin, and when he didn’t know what to say, he said nothing. Cowardly, he was hoping that Robin would take the plunge.
Robin had slung his linen jacket over one shoulder. He seemed very interested in the rose garden and the pretty wilderness that followed it, dotted with autumn colour and early berries and even some flower beds in bloom.
“What do you think?” Robin said eventually, nodding around them.
Edwin’s voice came out thistle-spiked. “I think if my name were Flora, I’d have avoided anything this obvious.”
Robin stopped. He was a few steps ahead, beneath a trellis archway of greenery. “This has rather shaken you up, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, don’t,” snapped Edwin, throat scratched with guilt. “Don’t go being nice, how can you constantly be like this, when it’s your arm and your visions and someone else’s bloody mess—and I made it worse—and Reggie might be dead, and here we are dancing like sodding debutantes around the fact that you might be next, and who knows what—”
“Edwin. Shut up,” Robin suggested.
Edwin did, gratefully. He snagged two fingers through a gap in the trellis, sagging the weight of his arm there, trying to formulate an apology. Robin put his hand between Edwin’s shoulder blades, patted twice, then let it stay.
“I hope that wasn’t you trying to be comforting,” Robin said after a moment. “Because you’re dashed miserable at it, if so.”
Edwin made a small, pained noise that was trying to be a laugh, and let himself lean back into Robin’s palm. As a rule, he did not enjoy physical contact. It usually seemed an intrusion, or mistimed, or compounding whatever distress or insult or small condescension the touch had been meant to mitigate. He was still full of an off-balance ambivalence, a tingling awareness of Flora Sutton’s fingers on his cheeks.
It seemed completely bizarre that Robin could reach out and touch Edwin like this, a casual hand on his back, and it could be perfect. Just as the touch on his arm last night, over tea, had also been perfect. Exactly what he needed in that moment and had been unaware of needing.
Edwin pressed his lips together and made a memory of it: a small thing to store and bring out later, when Robin was safely back out of his life. Then he moved away.
“Come on,” he said. “I do want to look at this maze.”
Not that he could make more than a stab at knowing anything about the plants themselves—yew? was that what one made mazes from?—but he halted near the maze entrance and didn’t mind the immediate wrench of wrongness in his stomach. It was something to be studied, and that meant he could endure it.
“It doesn’t look easy to cheat,” Robin said admiringly. The maze was, indeed, dense and leafy and half as high again as either of them. Robin trailed his fingers along the outer hedge. “It looks square, from here—how far back do you think it goes? I’m going to try and walk around.”
His footsteps crunched away as Edwin cradled the same detection charm he’d used at the estate boundary, and crouched down. Given what Mrs. Sutton had said, he assumed he’d have a stronger sense of the spell the closer he was to the roots, though this kind of charm couldn’t hold a candle to a nice thorough spell notation.