Two days ago. Wednesday. Hopefully not while Blyth was reporting to Asquith; that would have made an impression.
“A longer attack fits with what Hawthorn said about replication,” Edwin said, reluctant. Worsening. Damned damn indeed. He should have dragged Blyth to Penhallick the day after it was laid. Who knew how quickly it would progress? “You should have told me it had happened again.”
Blyth gave him an exceedingly stubborn look. God save Edwin from the idiotic flower of English manhood. “I’ve had worse in the boxing ring. And a cricket ball knocked my finger out of joint, my second year at Cambridge. That was no picnic either.” He waggled the finger in question: browned, blunt, and strong.
Edwin became aware that his own fingers were clenched around his cradling string in his pocket. A useless and belated reflex. “Are you sure it’s—finished? Gone?”
“Yes. Distract me. What were you saying, before it hit?”
It took Edwin a long second to scramble after the memory. His heart was pounding in his throat. He returned to his own side of the compartment.
“Family,” he said. “Not your—I mean, you’re the eldest? Inheriting the seat. The title.”
“It’s only me and my sister. Maud.” The lines of pain were fading from Blyth’s face. “You’re doing me a favour, inviting me away for the weekend. I’m escaping at least three awkward conversations. Maudie’s furious; I think she had her heart set on a roof-raising row. She likes having a head of the family she can actually argue with. ‘Head of the family.’” Blyth echoed himself. “Honestly, it’s an awful thought. I’m useless at it. Wish the last Sir Robert had had the sense to produce a couple more sons before he got around to me.” He shook his head, a smile starting to hover at the edges of his mouth. “Sorry. I must stop doing this. Blathering on like some terrible doom’s befallen me when there are chaps who’d cheerfully give their arm for a title.”
A bubble of memory took the opportunity to burst in Edwin’s mind. “Sir Robert Blyth,” he said. “And Lady Blyth. I do know the names. I’ve heard them talked about.”
“That would have pleased them.” Blyth seemed a straightforward sort, but it was hard not to scent his ambivalence.
“Philanthropy? Charity works?”
“Yes.”
The ambivalence was practically a miasma in the carriage now. Edwin didn’t press further, and Blyth’s shoulders dropped by an inch. Renowned parents and complicated feelings. Edwin could have some sympathy for that.
“You should start calling me Edwin,” he said before he could lose the nerve.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re informal, at Penhallick. And you’ll be swimming in Courceys.”
“Is that what your family calls you? Just Edwin?”
Walt had called him Eddie for nearly a year, when Edwin was nine and Walt thirteen, simply because Edwin hated it so much. Their mother had begged their father to put a stop to it, after Edwin had wept ragingly into her skirts, and Walt had waited two weeks before retaliating. Carefully, where the bruises wouldn’t show. And the burns on Edwin’s hands had been Edwin’s own fault, Walt pointed out; nobody had forced him to scramble among the embers for what remained of the notebook where he’d recorded a year’s worth of fledgling experiments with new spells, and which he’d thought he’d hidden carefully enough.
No, he’d paid the price to bury Eddie. There was nothing he could do about Win except lie to delay the inevitable.
“Yes. Edwin. Why, what do your family call you?”
“Perils of being named for my father. Robin.” Blyth’s smile made him look barely out of school. “You should do the same, if we’re to be friendly.”
“We are not,” Edwin began, but made himself stop. “Robin. All right.”
Edwin settled himself back against the leather of the seat. It was real. The rattle of the window in its frame was real. Robert Blyth was not exactly imaginary—no, he was too solid, too broad-shouldered, his voice too loud and too warm: the voice of someone who’d never had cause to make himself smaller. But the urge Edwin had to creep closer to that warmth, to imagine that it might be for him, somehow . . . that was illusion. Robert, Robin, was exactly the kind of person that Edwin had learned to dislike, and who had never needed instruction to dislike him right back. If he sometimes seemed to care for what Edwin thought, that was illusion too. There were exactly two people in the world who gave the smallest damn for Edwin’s opinion, and Len Geiger was only one of them because he might have gone out of business without the large chunk of Edwin’s allowance that ended up in his till every month.
No. It was just that Edwin was the only magician Robin Blyth had met so far who wasn’t actively wishing him harm.
Jack—Hawthorn—didn’t count. Indeed, his lordship was determined not to be counted. Not that it had stopped him from reinforcing the point: Edwin was an annoyance at best, something to be brushed off one’s coat and ejected from one’s house. Edwin didn’t care for this warm-voiced near-stranger’s opinion either; he didn’t, but surely he was allowed to hate that Hawthorn had made Edwin’s inferiority so clear right in front of the man’s face.
And now they were headed to a place where that inferiority would be made even more obvious.
Edwin tucked his hand into his pocket, tangled his fingertips in his string, and watched a row of poplars flick past the train window, rough yellow fingers reaching to the sky.
A vehicle that only escaped the label of dog-cart by the narrowest margin carried them from the tiny station through a two-pub village, along a road that meandered east, then deposited them and their luggage at the mouth of a narrower and better-kept road with a sign announcing PENHALLICK HOUSE.
It was an odd name for Cambridgeshire. Robin took an experimental breath, as though they might have somehow—magically?—ended up in Cornwall instead, but there was no sea edge to the air. He exhaled and felt foolish.
“It’s an easy walk from here,” said Courcey. Edwin. Edwin. The name suited him, in a fussy way. Apart from the straw of his hat, perched atop his pale hair, he still looked every inch the polished city man. He did not look like someone who had volunteered them to haul their luggage up a long, sloping drive simply for the joy of the stroll.
“I don’t mind a walk,” said Robin, mostly because Edwin seemed to be expecting him to argue.
The light was turning towards dusk and there was barely a breath of breeze to stir the leaves. Birds yelled from the hedges and bushes as they walked.
“So much for the quiet of the countryside,” said Robin. “Looks like a pastoral scene by any artist from the past two centuries; sounds like a fish market.”
“And people talk of country dirt as clean dirt as though that makes it any easier to remove from your trouser cuffs.” Edwin wasn’t smiling—in fact, he looked faintly disgusted—but they shared a look of more fellow-feeling than Robin might have hoped for.
Off administering a country seat, indeed. Robin had nothing at all against the country, but could never shake the impression that it would rather everyone buggered off to town and let it administer itself back into wilderness.
He was aware of the uselessness of this opinion when held by a baronet. No doubt Gunning would be thrilled if Robin were to remove himself to Thornley Hill and start tromping tweed-clad around its grounds with a gun slung over his forearm, discussing crop rotation with grizzled farmers.
Robin shook himself and caught up with Edwin, who was waiting at the crest of the gradual slope they’d been ascending.
Penhallick House sat cradled in the early dusk like a smug child in the crook of its mother’s arm. A splash of lawn ended in the pale gravel of the driveway and melded into the lines of gardens, set here and there with trees that rivalled the house in height.