A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

Author:Freya Marske
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor

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.

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