Lovely, Blyth had said.
Edwin hadn’t considered the aesthetics of the thing before. It was an experiment in crystallisation technique that had taken Edwin half a year to develop. As far as he knew, he was the only magician in England who could do it. And he still couldn’t manage the cradles without the crutch of string.
Aboveground, Edwin made his way up Charing Cross Road to one of the smallest bookshops, which sat between two larger and grander ones like a boy squashed between his parents on a bench.
“How d’you do, Mr. Courcey?” said Len Geiger as the bell hung by the door gave a rattling peal.
Edwin pulled off his hat and returned the greeting, forcing himself to stop and ask after Geiger’s family even though his feet wanted to drag him straight past the register. The warmth of the shop and the damp of the rain gave the air a greenhouse feel, which vanished as Edwin moved between shelves to the back of the shop. Here the air was as it should be: dry, edged with dust and leather and paper.
The mirror hung on the wall in the shop’s back corner was as tall as a man and spattered with tarnish, dimly reflecting the shadows and spines of books. Edwin touched the mirror’s surface and the illusion winked out in response to what he was. Not much of a magician, but enough. He stepped through into the room beyond.
At first glance this looked like a smaller reflection of the room Edwin had just left. More books, on more shelves. It had the quiet of an unoccupied chapel or the stacks of a library. Edwin set briefcase, hat, and coat down near the mirror through which he had stepped, and exhaled. He came here as other men went to gaming-rooms or brothels, orchestral performances or opium dens. Everyone had their own vice of relaxation. Edwin’s was just considered duller than most.
He browsed for a pleasant half hour, touching the spines of books with a reverent finger, occasionally pulling one from the shelf to check its table of contents. He resisted the urge to shove Manning’s abysmal thesis on visual illusions back into the shadows of other, worthier books.
Midway through the shelf labelled NATURAL SCIENCES & MAGICS, Edwin spotted an indigo-blue cover with the title stamped in gold: Working with Life: Kinoshita’s Sympathies & Manipulations. His breath caught, and he let it out in a low whistle.
Geiger’s face creased around his smile when he saw the book in Edwin’s hand, and he pulled out brown paper and string to wrap it. “Knew you’d appreciate that one, sir,” he said. “Got it in a box of donations two days ago. Thought I’d leave you the pleasure of finding it your own self.”
Edwin next ducked into another bookshop, this one even shabbier in appearance. Here he made an offhand comment about the weather, which was answered with a solemn nod and the slide of a much slimmer book, this one already brown-papered, across the counter.
The Cavendish was serving lunch in the dining room by the time Edwin returned home. He ate and took his purchases up to his rooms, which had been cleaned, with a fire lit in the largest grate. Fresh-laundered clothes hung in the wardrobe and lay folded neatly in the dresser. Edwin could have afforded his own valet, and his rented suite included a modest servant’s quarters, but at university he’d fallen out of the habit of being so closely attended. What he’d fallen into instead was the habit of enclosed privacy and quiet, and he’d no intention of fishing himself out of it. The Cavendish was well staffed and accustomed to catering to the needs of bachelors.
He cracked the window of his sitting room. Rain-washed air refreshed his face. Along with it came the noise of the city, but this was distant and familiar enough that Edwin would stop hearing it within minutes. He made tea and burned his finger on the kettle, and begrudged the amount of magic it took him to heal it and avoid the annoyance of having his cradling string rub against the sore spot for the next week.
The smaller of his two book parcels, when unwrapped, held a thin purple volume that was closer to a glorified pamphlet. Edwin opened it to a random page and read enough for his lips and his cock to twitch in unison, then set it aside and took the book from Geiger’s to his favourite velvet armchair in front of the fire.
Normally he’d have sunk into the dry, fascinating words as gratefully as he’d sunk into the atmosphere of the bookshop itself. He found it difficult today. The bruises from the visit to Reggie’s family were starting to smart: the pity, the familiarity, the blatant mirroring of Edwin’s own disgust at what he was compared to what he should be. Little wonder that the unmagical Reggie, like Edwin, had borne the expense of living outside his family home in London, and visited them so seldom.
And on top of that, tomorrow Edwin would have to go back to Whitehall and deal with Blyth again.
At least that would be a limited irritation. Edwin would explain the mistake to the Minister. Blyth would be given a cup of tea and sent back to his own life. Someone more suitable would be found in the interim. And eventually Reggie would reappear, and laugh at Edwin for worrying over nothing.
Edwin ran his eyes twice more over the page and then, when the words refused to line themselves up and be seen, replaced the sweep of his sight with that of a fingertip, finding pleasure in the tiny roughness of the paper. Edwin’s collection of small enjoyments was carefully cultivated. When he exhaled his worry he imagined it going up in the snap of the fire. He thought about the meticulous cogs of the Gatlings’ clock, and the particular hazel of Sir Robert Blyth’s eyes.
In the gaps between small things, Edwin could feel his quiescent magic like a single drop of blood in a bucket of water: more obvious than it deserved to be, given its volume. He could breathe into the knots in the back of his neck. And he could feel out the edges of the aching, yearning space in his life that no amount of quiet and no number of words had yet been able to fill.
Edwin had no idea what he ached for, no real sense of the shape of his ideal future. He only knew that if every day he made himself a little bit better—if he worked harder, if he learned more, more than anyone else—he might find it.
The attack came while Robin was thinking about roast beef.
Charlotte Street was full of rattling wheels and scuffing feet as he walked home from his boxing club. The day’s rain had cleared into a sullenly overcast sky. Robin’s wrist ached from where he’d let annoyance and the brain-spinning impact of the day—magic, magic—distract him during his last bout against Lord Bromley. Scholz, the scowling German ex-champion who owned the boxing club, had treated Robin to a heavily accented diatribe on keeping his wrists and shoulders at the correct angle.
Roast beef. With potatoes crisped at the edges and fluffy on the inside, and golden Yorkshire pudding, and a savoury drape of gravy over the whole.
Robin sighed. No doubt the dinner at home would be fine, but the club only did that particular roast on Mondays. On a normal evening he’d have much preferred to join the group of his friends going directly from the boxing ring to the club’s dining room, then head home late enough into the night that he could dodge whatever conversations were waiting for him.
This was not a normal evening. It had not been a normal day, even by the off-balance new standards for normal that had invaded Robin’s life since his parents had died.
“Sir. Moment of your time, sir.”
Robin wouldn’t have looked up, but the rough voice was accompanied by a touch on the back of his hand, and he wondered if his pocket was being picked. He loosened his arms, ready to lash out, and slowed his steps.
That was a mistake. A loop of yarn slid over his hand and tightened on his wrist. Robin thought first and absurdly of the string that Courcey had used to make the snowflake.