She could have gone on to say even more, which was that magic ran in her family, sort of, that it was something of a tradition, but she never did. People tended to be a bit funny about it, and actually Plum felt a bit funny about it too, so she kept it to herself. It wasn’t hard, because she’d lived most of her life in America and had not even a trace of an English accent, and it was on her mother’s side so Chatwin wasn’t even her last name.

It was her mother’s name though: she was the daughter of Rupert Chatwin’s only son, and that made Plum, as far as she knew, the last living direct descendant of the famous Chatwins of the Fillory books. No one else in that generation had managed to reproduce, so she was the heir to whatever Chatwins were heir to (though as she was not slow to point out she wasn’t a Chatwin at all but a Purchas, Plum Polson Purchas, Chatwin wasn’t even her middle name). And as a matter of fact there had been a sum of money, royalties that Plover had graciously set aside for the children who’d made his fortune. (His second fortune; he’d been rich already when he started writing about Fillory.) Rupert had used his share to buy a big house in the countryside outside Penzance, which he barely ever left, until the army called him up to die in World War II.

Plum had seen pictures of it, one of those houses that always gets referred to as a pile, a big Georgian pile. It had a name, but she’d forgotten it. Her mother had grown up there, but she didn’t talk much about her childhood—a drafty, echoing place was how she described it. Not a place to be a kid in. The floor was littered with falls of plaster from the crumbling moldings, and Plum’s mother spent winter afternoons huddled up on the stairs by a huge heating duct, big enough for her to have crawled into if the entrance hadn’t been covered by a knotted-wrought-iron grate, and letting the lukewarm air wash weakly over her.

When she grew up Plum’s mother left her heritage behind. Her Chatwin ancestors struck her as dangerously melancholy and fanciful, and she sold the house and its contents and moved to America to become a publicist for Microsoft. She met Plum’s dad at a charity ball, and it wasn’t till they were well into their courtship that he revealed to her what he really did in all his spare time. Once Mom got over the shock of a lifetime, they went ahead and got married anyway and had Plum, and they were a happy magical nuclear family.