Edwin spun and stared at the corpse of Flora Sutton. Slowly, he felt the marks fade.
“I . . . don’t understand,” said Robin.
“Neither do I,” said Edwin. Thin hysteria was frothing in the back of his mouth. He managed to choke it back with a laugh. “It should have refused me. If it’d had any sense . . .”
Sense. As if an estate were a rational being, which would make conscious decisions or be argued with. As far as Sutton Cottage was concerned, Edwin had planted his blood in the soil and wildly sworn himself to as much of the land as would have him, on an estate far more magical than he himself had ever been, in the moment when its mistress had just died without heirs and in the hour after she’d laid her hands on his cheeks. The maze hadn’t settled because it was trying to protect Robin; Robin had never been its target in the first place. It had settled because it was refusing to harm Edwin.
From somewhere in the house came a dull knock, followed by the sound of a bell. “That’ll be the doctor,” said the butler, and vanished from the parlour.
“Edwin,” said Robin. He had that storm-soaked look on his face again, the one that meant he was coming to the end of his store of credulity for one day. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Oh, nothing of consequence,” said Edwin. “I’ve merely inherited one of the oldest magical estates in Cambridgeshire.”
By the time the doctor left it was close to dinnertime, and the prospect of driving all the way back to Penhallick in the dark was something neither Robin nor Edwin felt up to facing. The household offered to make up rooms for them to sleep in.
“It might be easiest,” Robin said. “It’d be a game to explain why we look like we’ve been dragged behind horses through a briar-patch, if we went to an inn somewhere closer.”
“You could show them your calling card,” said Edwin, but it came out of the shallows of his mind, murmured and barely meant. By now he was a bundle of pains, of bodily exhaustion and leftover nausea, of feeling simultaneously emptied of magic and as though a magic not his own was pressing around him, eager and impatient, demanding recognition. It was nothing he’d ever felt before and he would have preferred to escape it. To step back across that line of trees and be normal once more. He felt irrationally as though if he slept at Sutton Cottage he’d wake up woven into the wallpaper.
But Robin looked just as tired as Edwin felt. And a core of Edwin managing to make itself heard beneath the fear was saying that Edwin had entered into contract, no matter how impulsively, and abandoning the land before the sun had set on that contract would be . . . rude? Impolitic?
Unhallowed. The word swam up and laid itself like an oil-sheen over the waves of Edwin’s exhaustion.
“Mr. Courcey?” Mrs. Greengage was holding herself straight, not providing much clue as to whether she would prefer to welcome the estate’s unexpected new owner or kick him out on his ear.
Edwin nodded. “We’ll stay. Thank you.”
“And we apologise for the bother of it, on top of all the shocks you’ve had today,” said Robin, in tones far warmer than Edwin had managed. “Do let us know if there’s somewhere we’ll be out of your way.”
They were tidied out of the way into a small sitting room, cold from having its curtains drawn, presumably to prevent the fading of several tapestries and large watercolours that Robin inspected immediately.
Edwin sat on a sofa and let his head rest in his hands. Robin should have been the one to have an estate crash into his grasp. He needed money; Edwin didn’t. He knew how to be nice to people, to make them feel appreciated. Edwin was lucky to remember to nod at acquaintances in the street.
Dinner was quiet, the meal obviously prepared in a heroic effort to cater to young male palates from a kitchen stocked mostly by the tastes of an old woman. Afterwards, they were shown up to rooms that had the musty and faintly surprised air of places where the dustcovers had only just been whisked off the furniture.
Edwin poured water from ewer to basin and splashed some onto his face, pushed back his hair, and stared blankly at the thin face in the dresser’s mirror, scored with red marks. The darker red of the jacquard silk dressing gown did his pallor no favours at all. His clothes had been taken away to be cleaned and mended; they’d not changed for dinner, having nothing suitable to change into. The gown still smelled faintly of mothballs. In its pocket Edwin had stowed a new loop of string, which he’d begged from the housekeeper. He dipped his fingertips in and touched it for comfort.