She peered at the curse in turn, coming close enough that Edwin could smell the floral-chemical scent of her hair, pinned up in its usual nest of luxuriant black. “Alas,” she said. “I haven’t a clue. And I’m hardly the best person you could be asking.”
No. A continuance of the sinking sensation in Edwin’s stomach signaled exactly whom he should be asking, and the very idea made him want to take a train to Dover and fling himself over the cliffs.
“Something hidden in the office,” Edwin said instead, looking at the chaos around them.
“I’d assumed they’d have tossed the office first thing, if they knew it was here,” said Blyth. “But no, they had to wait until I arrived.”
“There are ways to look for magical items without resorting to this kind of petulance,” said Edwin, bending to pick up the most egregiously wronged book within arm’s reach. He smoothed the bent pages and set it on the desk.
“That’s what confused me,” said Miss Morrissey. “They could have searched the office five times for something that holds power, and we’d have never known.”
“No, he said a contract.” Blyth cast a meaningful glance around the mounds of paper. “I do remember that, because you’d been going on about how all of magic is—oh, blast. Is it not a piece of paper then?”
“If he meant a spell, he’d have said a spell,” said Edwin, but he wasn’t sure. He thought longingly of the sixteenth-century French magician who’d claimed to have found a method for reliving a person’s memories alongside them. Having to rely on the firsthand account of an unmagical amateur who’d only stumbled into his unbusheling the previous day was galling.
“I haven’t found anything with the slightest whiff of a legal flavour to it. Before you stormed in I was opening his letters. Not that it’s helped much.” Blyth sifted through a slim pile of unopened envelopes. “And these ones don’t look awfully promising either. Three within the fortnight from someone who signs himself the Grimm of Gloucester—”
“Crackpot of the first order,” said Miss Morrissey, and Edwin nodded in agreement. The Grimm had been writing his lurid, unreadably rambling letters to this office for decades now.
“And here’s one from a Mrs. Flora Sutton, in an envelope that—ugh—smells like it’s been doused in attar of roses. Was the chap having an affair with a dashing widow, do we think? Or perhaps . . . not even a widow?”
“She’d hardly have written to him at the office, if so,” Edwin snapped. “Don’t be foolish.”
Blyth raised his eyebrows. “Calm down, old man. Only joking.”
Only joking. The words reminded Edwin unpleasantly of the fellows who tended to be friends with his brother Walt: bullishly immune to sarcasm, and smirkingly aware of their power. Most of their jokes weren’t the slightest bit funny.
Showing any kind of reaction just provided more ammunition. Edwin knew that. Still, he found himself glaring.
“You’ve been cursed, and you think this is a time to make jokes?”
Blyth shoved his sleeve down again. “I’ve been cursed, so I’ll make all the jokes I please.”
Edwin thought again, with a startling pinprick of guilt, of the small bottle of lethe-mint in his pocket. Like laudanum dropped into my drink. Blyth had come uncomfortably close there.
But dammit, Edwin couldn’t let Blyth go stumbling back to his life under the power of an unidentified curse. Knowing or unknowing. Edwin didn’t believe in that kind of cruelty. No matter what kind of person he was, Blyth deserved to be disentangled fully.
Which meant that Edwin wasn’t going to go charging off to the Minister to demand a new Home Office counterpart. He was stuck with this one, at least until he could learn enough about that curse to remove it.
“As I said, I’ll need to do some research. And”—damn, damn, no avoiding it—“there’s someone who should take a look at that curse. His family’s always had a knack for working in runes.” If he even let them in the front door.
“Very well, if you think it’s worth a try,” said Blyth. “We’ll be here. Sorting. You can go and fetch this someone.”
“Fetch,” Edwin said. “Of course. Is there anything else I can bring back for you, Sir Robert?”
That appeared to sail over Blyth’s head. “Though really, I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m looking for here. Why don’t you stay and help? It’ll go faster with three.”
There was no magic at all in Blyth’s voice, in the note of casual command that rang golden in his vowels, but something about it tried to capture Edwin’s feet anyway. Edwin swallowed a hot mouthful of resentment and fumbled for his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. He could invent a pressing engagement and insist that they meet up later; Blyth wouldn’t question it.
Miss Morrissey’s contemptuous look, from her position on the floor, dared him to try. Besides, the likelihood of Hawthorn allowing himself to be fetched anywhere was about par with the likelihood that Edwin would spontaneously gain the ability to freeze a lake’s surface with a wave of his hands. A feat that he had, in fact, seen Hawthorn accomplish when they were boys.
“Yes, very well.” He knew he sounded ungracious. “At least putting all of this in order will familiarise you with some aspects of the position.” Reggie’s position. Still Reggie’s.
“Crackpots and far too much paper,” said Blyth. He directed the smile at Miss Morrissey, but he’d started it—perhaps by mistake—when he was looking at Edwin, and it was like being caught in the last rays of sunset. “Sounds like government work to me.”
They left Miss Morrissey in a halfway tidied office. At a certain point in the re-filing process, she’d given up all pretence that she wasn’t seizing the opportunity to impose order on what seemed to have previously been a rather slapdash approach to organisation. She’d all but shovelled them out of Whitehall with the calm promise that she’d have a briefing paper ready for Robin to deliver to the Prime Minister the next day.
Robin was beginning to get a sense for the way the Office of Special Domestic Affairs and Complaints had functioned under his predecessor. Or rather, adjacent to him. Possibly even despite him.
It was odd. Courcey didn’t seem the type to have any patience for laziness or clutter, and nothing he’d said about Gatling had made the man seem extraordinarily likeable. Though the puzzle of Gatling’s personality couldn’t hold a candle to the puzzle of his disappearance, or of this mysterious contract—or, for that matter, the entire enormous mystery of magic, which Robin could feel sucking at the edges of his concentration even more strongly today as the buffer of shock began to wear away.
Today’s rain barely counted as rain except that the air was more wet than otherwise. There was nothing worth raising an umbrella against as Courcey led Robin across Green Park in the direction of Mayfair. The lawns stretched away from them, dotted with ducks on the hunt for worms, and the paths were pearled with puddles.
Robin nearly fell in one when the pain started.
It came from nowhere, as sudden as it had been when the curse was laid—that same invisible cage of red-hot wires, so intense that his mind tried to scream the impossibility of it. He managed to catch the rather more audible scream behind his tongue, where it silently strained. No point making a fuss in the middle of a public park. But oh God, it hurt.
When it stopped he was bent over his own arm, breathing hard. A muscle in the back of his neck twinged as he straightened, as if he’d thrown a poor punch. Courcey’s eyes were wide, the blue of them washed out by the sky.
“It hurt,” Robin said, forestalling questions. “Like when they put the blasted thing on in the first place.”
“It—looked like it.” For a second Robin thought Courcey might reach for him, but the man curled his hand in an awkward fist. “Well. At least now we know what it does,” he added. “Good. That may help. Can you walk?”
“I’m not a damned invalid,” said Robin, nettled by the decisiveness of the word good—as though Robin were nothing more than the problem on his bloody arm.