It was momentarily difficult for Robin to keep his expression pleasant, hearing this echo of Walter’s dig at Edwin the night before. Robin hadn’t known quite what to make of Edwin’s brother. Everyone else had deferred to him, but it was more than the usual deference to a favoured and charismatic eldest son. There had been a strange, balancing-act tension in the air that casual sibling animosity couldn’t explain. It had put Robin’s teeth on edge, and it was a relief to know that Walt wouldn’t be a regular member of the house party.
“Bel’s leaving everyone to their own devices this morning, but she’ll insist you both join us for boating on the lake after lunch,” Charlie said to Robin.
“I don’t know if we’ll be—” Robin started, but Charlie said, “Nonsense!” and turned back to his bowl of kedgeree.
Robin swallowed half a cup of tea in two gulps, winced at the spasm of complaint in his throat, and murmured something noncommittal as he escaped the breakfast room.
When he found the library, he stopped a few feet inside the door in order to stare. He’d been in manor-house libraries before. Even Thornley Hill had a modest one, and he’d been envisaging something like that: a room stuffy with dust and gloomy with solid last-century furnishings, shelves packed with matching sets of untouched leather-bound books.
The library at Penhallick House was two storeys high, with a narrow balcony running along the two walls that were lined with bookcases stretching from the floor to the ceiling. Another wall held arch-topped windows, their curtains caught at the waists to allow morning light to spill into the room. A single rug was set well back from the fireplace that dominated the final wall, a mouth of wrought iron surrounded by tiles patterned with white vines on vivid orange. The rest of the floor was an intricate and angular pattern of inlaid wood, blond and amber-brown shades set at angles to one another, crawling in regular lines from one wall to the next.
That was what you saw looking straight ahead. Looking up, all you saw was books. Robin remembered, belatedly, Edwin saying that they had one of the largest private collections in the country.
Hawthorn had called Edwin a librarian and clearly meant it as an insult. But Robin felt like he was viewing a page from a book on exotic creatures, demonstrating how the patterns of their hides allowed them to blend into their surroundings. Edwin stood near the centre of the library floor, shirtsleeves rolled to mid-forearm, one hand turning the page of a thick book splayed open on a table while the other scratched at the back of his neck. Looking at him, Robin realised that before this moment he’d never seen Edwin Courcey look even the slightest bit comfortable.
Robin let the heavy door swing noiselessly shut behind him, and cleared his throat. Edwin’s head rose.
“There you are,” said Edwin, as though Robin were a tardy schoolboy. “When you said paint, were you joking around?”
“Good morning to you too,” said Robin. “What paint?”
“Last night, you said you could paint your visions.”
Robin had been joking, more or less. He was a mediocre artist at best. But he thought about trying to cram words around what he’d seen, with Edwin’s impatient eyes needling him, and suddenly the alternative didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“I can try drawing one of them,” he said. “If you’ve pencils?”
A nod. “I do. Now, come here and roll up your sleeve.”
So it was Edwin who wielded the pencils first, while Robin held out his bared right forearm and Edwin copied down the runes of the curse with painstaking care. Neither of them commented on the fact that it reached fully to Robin’s elbow now. Curled up in the corner of Robin’s soul, like a summer-basking snake, was the fear that had opened its eyes when Hawthorn first said, It’ll keep getting worse. Every time the pain claimed him that fear shed its skin and grew larger.
Edwin took the piece of paper with him halfway up the ladder leading to the balcony. He shouldn’t have blended in, Robin thought, watching him. There was no sense to it. Edwin wore a white shirt and a waistcoat backed in ivory satin, his long legs clad in cloud-grey flannel that looked soft to the touch. He was overdressed for this country party; Charlie had worn a sports jacket at breakfast. Edwin was a slip of a figure, insubstantial and underpigmented against the richness of the shelves and books.
Edwin said, “Hm. Zeta twenty-nine four,” and the ladder flew sideways on its runners as though pushed by an enthusiastic hand, carrying Edwin to the corner of the library.
Robin pulled a piece of paper in front of him and began to draw the vision that he remembered most clearly. The glass floor, with its dark geometric lines. The view upwards; the many pairs of feet crossing to and fro.
All right, it wasn’t the one he remembered most clearly. But he was hardly going to draw that one.
He was absorbed enough in his task that he didn’t look up when Edwin dropped a small pile of books onto one end of the table. He did look up when Edwin said, sharply, “When were you at the Barrel?”
“Beg pardon?” said Robin.
Edwin slid the paper out from Robin’s hands. “That’s the view from the ground floor of the Barrel. The building that houses the Magical Assembly,” he added, in light of what was probably a blank expression on Robin’s face. “We call it the Barrel, because—but you must have been there.”
“Me, I’m an accident of paperwork,” said Robin. “Remember? I haven’t been anywhere except where you’ve been dragging me. This was in the first lot of my visions.”
Edwin frowned down at the paper. He traced one of the dark lines with a finger. “A real place you’ve never been. That rules out waking dreams. You could be seeing through someone else’s eyes, in that moment, but why a curse—”
“That’s not it,” said Robin. “The first time it was—lots, at once, and all different. And . . .” He swallowed, and told Edwin about the vision he’d had of Lord Hawthorn on the boat, while standing in the doorway of Hawthorn’s room.
“Did he look older? Younger?”
“Not visibly.”
“Past, present, future,” said Edwin. He didn’t seem to be talking to Robin anymore. He dug in a pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out his string, looping it rapidly around his hands. “Not the present. Perhaps one of the others.”
“That’s possible? Seeing the future?”
Edwin’s mouth thinned. “No. Yes. Foresight’s not even proper magic, nobody knows where it comes from, and it’s too rare for there to be any hope of studying it properly. Half the confirmed cases in history weren’t even in magicians. There’s one in India at the moment, and one in Germany, and I haven’t the foggiest about any others. People with it get . . . snapped up. They’re useful.” He shot Robin an uneasy look. His thumbs were moving in a graceful dance. “I’ve never heard of it being induced. If someone knew how to induce it, through a curse or by any other means, they’d make a fortune.”
“And wouldn’t go around bestowing it willy-nilly on people they’re trying to threaten, one assumes,” said Robin.
The cradle formed between Edwin’s hands wasn’t glowing, but the air caught within the string shimmered like the space above a hot pan. “Pi sixty-seven, pi sixty-one, kappa fourteen two, beta zero one seven through nine.” Edwin clapped his hands, crushing the string between them, then made a flicking motion.
A sparse rustling sound like the wind in half-naked trees came from the bookshelves, and books shouldered their way out from the shelves like audience members called eagerly onstage to participate in—well, a magic show. They floated over to the table and settled in a row, ready to be opened.
Robin felt like his entire face was a question. It must have been; Edwin looked at him and began at once to answer it.
“When I was twelve I spent an entire summer coming up with my own tables of classification based on subject matter. I’ve had to expand the system several times since then.” He glanced around. “Luckily one can just keep adding more numbers. An alphabetisation charm is—well, more complicated than you’d think, the notation takes up half a page. But it’s been designed. It’s easy to implement. It’s just not sensible for a reference library. Where did you study?”
“Pembroke,” said Robin. “Rah, Light Blues.”