“For trying anyway, I suppose. It can’t have been pleasant.”
“No worse than a handful of splinters when you’re spinning an orchard from twigs.”
“What does that mean?”
Courcey coloured. “Nothing. It’s a saying. A kind of proverb.”
“A magical proverb? Like the—marvellous light thing? Miss Morrissey told me, when she was explaining about unbusheling,” Robin added when Courcey looked startled.
“We are man’s marvellous light We hold the gifts of the dawn From those now passed and gone / And carry them into the night.” Courcey spoke coolly enough that it took a moment for the rhythm to emerge. “It’s a verse from an old poem by a magician called Alfred Dufay. There’s a spell-game set to it, that children learn. The other one is just—something you say.” He sighed. “The poem’s very long, and not very good. I can show you the whole thing. We’ve a book of Dufay’s work in the family library at Penhallick.”
“Thank . . . you?”
Courcey’s mouth twisted. “We’ve one of the largest private collections in the country, including a handful of books that contain information on rune-curses. I’ll go there this weekend, to try to find out more.” After a moment he added, any reluctance smoothed so far into neutrality that Robin couldn’t hear it: “And you should probably come along. I don’t want to rely on a drawing of the curse, especially if it’s changing, and I might need to do a few tests.”
Robin swallowed both an unmanly squawk of Tests? and the instinctive groan of someone to whom research had always felt like pushing a lump of marble uphill. “All right. Books are at least somewhat less likely to hurl insults at one,” he said.
“It is one of their major appeals,” said Courcey, and Robin found himself unexpectedly smiling.
The station platforms were crowded on that Friday afternoon. It was the third weekend of autumn; the Season was over, the weather promised to be crisp but still eke out occasional scraps of sunshine, and half of London was fleeing to the country for either prolonged shooting jaunts or Saturday-to-Monday house parties. Edwin saw a cluster of young women laughing and waving from atop piles of luggage as a train pulled out, the moving air sending their hat-ribbons fluttering.
Blyth had acquired them first-class tickets from the office account, at Miss Morrissey’s insistence. They were heading to Penhallick to investigate an intrusion of the magical world onto the unmagical, she’d pointed out, with a meaningful glance at Blyth’s arm. That fell within the bounds of their job descriptions.
For the first stretch of the journey north they shared a compartment with a dignified couple who spoke in the shorthand murmurs of the long-married. Blyth read the Times; Edwin worked his way through two chapters of Kinoshita, not bothering to waste energy on disguising the cover. For the most part, people didn’t see the unfamiliar unless it threw itself in their face.
Or emblazoned itself on their arm, he supposed, looking up from a deeply confusing paragraph about using fish to navigate by sea. The train was pulling in to Harlow and the couple were gathering their luggage. Blyth ducked to avoid a blow from a hatbox, folded his paper, and met Edwin’s eyes as the compartment door closed, leaving them alone.
“Come on, then,” Blyth said. “Tell me about this estate we’re headed to.”
Kinoshita nipped Edwin’s finger as he reluctantly closed it. “There isn’t a lot to tell. I can’t claim it’s been in the family for generations. My parents bought Penhallick just after my sister was born, and to hear them talk it was ramshackle at best. I think they liked having something they could splash their own tastes over.” Edwin brushed a fingertip up and down the book’s edge. “It’s a large house, but there’s plenty of room to keep to yourself. If that’s what you want.”
“Why do you do this?” Blyth asked, abruptly. “The—liaison thing?”
It wasn’t difficult to follow his reasoning. Edwin’s family had money. Edwin had money, even if he lacked the precise vowels of someone who hadn’t needed to rely on a scholarship to get to Oxford. Edwin was not, to even the dimmest observer, a man delighted by his post of employment.
“I was asked to do it. The Chief Minister’s a friend of my father’s.” And when Edwin had tried, uncharacteristically, to dig in his heels and refuse, Clifford Courcey had made it a condition of his youngest child’s allowance. Edwin keenly remembered the humiliation of that discussion. The implication that Edwin was never going to be good for anything else. “It’s not strenuous. I’ve plenty of time for my research.” Edwin lobbed the question back across the net. “Why are you doing this?”
Blyth shrugged. “I scraped my Second at Cambridge by the skin of my teeth, and probably scraped my way through the civil service exam even more narrowly. I was never going to get put on anything grand. I did spend a few years as a junior in Gladstone’s office. But—look, Lord Healsmith hated my parents. He was looking for a way to take it out on me, and he had the chance to shove me into a job that looked like a dead end.”
“But you’re titled,” said Edwin. “I wouldn’t have thought . . .”
“Baronet,” said Blyth, which Edwin had already guessed; the man was hardly old enough to have nabbed himself a knighthood. Blyth looked glum about it. “Only inherited a month ago.”
“I’m—sorry.”
Another shrug.
Edwin gave up on politeness. “Why are you bothering with this sort of employment at all? Why aren’t you off administering a country seat, or whatever it is that baronets do?”
A pause. “Idealism?”
“Civil servants don’t get to choose their masters. It’s Asquith and the Liberals now; it could be someone else in another few years.”
Blyth’s mouth twitched. He didn’t look offended. “You don’t think it’s possible to want to serve your country?”
“Would you do it if you weren’t paid to do it?” Edwin countered.
It was the wrong thing to say. The hints of humour vanished.
“No,” Blyth said, and looked out the window.
Edwin put the pieces together. A few years directly under the Home Secretary; that sounded about right, for landed gentry of mediocre intelligence, despite the so-called egalitarianism of the entrance exam. And now Blyth had been shoved into a job that did, from the outside, have all the trappings of demotion. But he’d turned up anyway. Because he was being paid.
Edwin turned the picture in his mind a few times and then set it firmly aside.
He cleared his throat. A peace offering. He was woefully out of practice at making friendly overtures, but he could scrape together some small talk. “And your family, are—”
Between one word and the next, Blyth made a low, strangled noise and doubled over where he sat, his body clenching around his right forearm.
“Blyth.” Edwin lunged across the compartment, stumbled over his own feet, and half fell onto the floor with a curse. His cheeks burned, though Blyth hadn’t noticed. Blyth might not have noticed if the train had left the tracks and hurtled onto its side. “Blyth,” Edwin said again, laying a hand on the man’s knee in order to haul himself up and sit next to him.
Blyth’s whole body was shivering at a frequency finer than the vibration of the train carriage. Edwin snatched his hand back as Blyth, with what looked like real effort, uncurled his body and lifted his head. His chest rose and fell and his breath rasped through parted lips. He looked as though he was trying to drive the thumb of his left hand through his forearm. Then, as suddenly as he’d tensed, he slumped on the seat with a long, loud inhalation.
“The damned—damn,” Blyth said.
“How many times has it happened since the park?” Edwin demanded.
“Just once, two days ago,” Blyth said. “Lasted longer this time.”