Even as he tried to focus on it, the glass dissolved into nothing and left an empty space. A frame that could be stepped through. There was a much smaller room beyond, barely four paces to each dimension, with a small desk and a squat bookshelf.
Behind Edwin, it sounded as though all the domestic staff inhaled at once. He ignored them, because he could just see a name on one of the spines—was that Howson? A high step brought him into the room, where he skirted round the desk and crouched by the bookshelf. The lowest shelf was all notebooks bound in black leather with gold embossed dates—records, diaries?—but the top two were books, and what books. Treatises that Edwin had only ever heard of, names he’d never thought to see attached to printed works at all. A copy of the same Kinoshita he’d been so thrilled to pick up from Geiger’s; that gave him a stab of irrational annoyance.
“Mr. Courcey?” came from the room behind him.
With a sigh, Edwin stood again, climbed back out of the frame, and blinked. Every single person in the parlour was staring at him. Robin had taken a seat, legs sprawled tiredly. The maid had her hand to her mouth.
It dawned belatedly on Edwin that he’d just spent a good few minutes poring over a dead woman’s book collection while her corpse cooled and the question of her death still hung in the room like poisonous vapours.
“Er,” said Edwin. “Was it . . . common knowledge that this room was here?”
“Yes, sir,” said the butler, rather stiff.
“Ah. Good. I want to buy those books,” Edwin blurted. Then winced, mostly because Robin was wincing. Being a normal polite person was proving even more difficult than usual, buffeted as he was by the shocks of the day’s events and the tentacles of sheer intellectual greed that were telling him to snatch up Flora Sutton’s private library and never let it go. “Not that I’m saying—I don’t mean today—of course, it’ll be a question for whomever inherits the place.”
A choked giggle came from the maid. The butler and housekeeper exchanged a look that contained encyclopaedias and also, somehow, an argument. Edwin didn’t know who won it, but it was the butler who took a fraction of a step forward and coughed. He was a tall man with greying fair hair receding back from a high forehead.
“I’m afraid I’m not as familiar with the connections between the families of the area as I should be, sir,” he said in a tone that implied the opposite. “Did you say you were here to see Mrs. Sutton on family business? Are you a relation of the Suttons?”
“No, not at all,” said Edwin. “I know her—knew her”—God, the amount of past tense in this entire situation was horrifying—“great-nephew. Reginald Gatling.”
Another information-dense look was exchanged.
“The Rose Study,” said the butler, with impeccably enunciated capitals, “is one of those parts of the house which respond only to the owners and their heirs. So you see the purpose of my question. Sir.”
“What are you implying?” said Robin, sharply.
Edwin shook his head. Much as he would have simultaneously loved and hated to believe his father was not his father—and there had been times in his childhood when the sheer prospect of being only half-related to Walt by birth would have made him forgive his mother any amount of straying from the marriage bed—there was too much resemblance to hope for that.
“I’m not—” he said, then stopped. A different sort of impossibility bubbled up and presented itself to the part of his mind that was always looking to make sense of the senseless.
Surely not. Surely.
“What is it?” asked Robin.
Edwin looked from one of the servants to the other. It took all the courage he had never possessed to say the next words. “I made blood-pledge. With the ground beneath the hedge maze, to stop it from attacking us.” He swallowed hard. “I thought it would just be the maze, I thought—honestly, I didn’t think it would work at all.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but you should touch the mirror again,” said the maid.
“Mina,” said Mrs. Greengage, sharp.
Edwin turned and did so, with the hand not holding the pendant. The illusion of glass was back in place. It wavered, as if unsure what Edwin wanted, then held. Edwin’s face heated again and this time he saw on his reflection what he’d barely glimpsed last time: the flush of blood in his cheeks, over which the white marks of two hands stood out like tracks in snow.
One hand on each cheek, exactly where she’d laid them. An affinity, she’d said.