She blanched and twisted her ring, uncomfortable. “I don’t know. You could ask the Coopers.”
“No, that doesn’t work either. If the people looking for the contract killed him for being secret-bound, they’d surely have searched him afterwards.” Edwin shuddered, reminded of the casual force with which the fog-masked man had shoved him into the maze. He thought, uneasily, of Robin, who was just as vulnerable to magic as he’d ever been.
For lack of anything else to do, they took the office apart. Again.
They turned up no knives whatsoever, though did unearth a dusty penny coin tucked between wainscoting and floorboards. Miss Morrissey balanced it dubiously on her palm before handing it to Edwin, who slipped it into the pocket of his waistcoat just in case. He remembered Mrs. Sutton saying, He left with it in his pocket.
“It’s very well disguised, if that’s it,” said Miss Morrissey.
There were also plenty of cups, though they were porcelain and painted with primroses, and Miss Morrissey swore all five of them had been untidily stacked in the cupboard from the day she started work there two years ago. Edwin inspected them anyway, then handed them back and watched her restack them. The bright silver ring on her index finger was not quite regular, he noticed when she took the last cup from him. There was a triangular notch in it, deep and neat enough to be due to design rather than misadventure.
Edwin had seen that ring before.
He picked up her hand to look at it and only realised the rudeness of this when she sucked in her breath. He dropped it at once.
“My apologies,” he said. “That ring of yours. Where is it from?”
“My ring?” She tugged it off. “It’s not a token from a sweetheart, or anything like that. It was a birthday gift last month, from”—her hand fumbled, holding it out—“Reggie. Only a few weeks late, but you know how he was with remembering dates. Half the time it was a miracle that he had the briefing ready on Wednesdays.” A tremble of excitement entered her voice as Edwin took the ring from her. “Do you think it’s important? It’s not—any of those three things.”
Reggie was bad with dates, and with keeping time in general. And just like that Edwin, rubbing with his finger at the ring’s notch, remembered where he’d seen its twin. Hanging on the inner wall of the Gatlings’ oak-heart clock, which had started going wrong a month ago, as if the oak-heart was running low.
Or if something had disrupted the delicate balance of its magical mechanism.
Edwin’s pulse knocked at the groove of his throat. Cup, coin, knife—that was just a story for children, after all, and this was a coincidence too strong to ignore. Reggie Gatling, who had stumbled upon a secret that people would kill for, and who had been one step ahead of those people right up until the moment he wasn’t, had passed on two silver rings. One of them hidden away in his family’s house; the other hidden in plain sight, right here at the office, exactly where the contract’s seekers expected to find it.
Not much could pass a secret-bind. A jumbled clue to location might have been all an interrogator could wrangle before—well. Before. Edwin’s skin crawled and he set the ring on the desk, then proceeded to cast every detection-spell that he could think of before his magic whimpered down to the dregs. Nothing. Magically, the ring seemed inert.
An object of power has a weight to it. Edwin thought of Mrs. Sutton’s fern-fossil and wanted to growl in frustration at his own ignorance. All he wanted was to know things, when and how he needed to know them. Right now he was failing at that.
Nonetheless, he explained his suspicions to Miss Morrissey, who looked on the verge of donning her hat and coat to come charging the Gatlings’ fortress with him. Edwin only managed to persuade her to stay by convincing her that he’d be much better trying to retrieve the second ring by stealth, given he had the excuse of having handled the clock before. Besides, Reginald Gatling’s well-spoken Indian typist from the Home Office would be a memorable visitor. Edwin was already in this up to his neck. Nobody had thought Miss Morrissey worth investigating yet; there was no need to drag her into the spotlight now.
Miss Morrissey glared her disdain for Edwin’s attempts to shield her from danger, but he repeated the words curse and murder until she agreed to let him go alone, albeit making him swear up and down that as soon as he had the second ring in hand he’d come back to the office and show her.
It was midafternoon by then, the shadows long and the world clammier than ever. Edwin burrowed into his muffler as he stood on the Gatlings’ doorstep. He asked if Miss Anne was at home and was given a disapproving “The family is in mourning, sir.”
Edwin hadn’t even thought of that. If he knew Anne and Dora Gatling at all, they’d be chafing under the restrictions. The traditions around mourning dress and behaviour had been easing off, in Edwin’s lifetime, but there were still plenty of people who would whisper if the family of a recently deceased man continued to pay morning calls in bright colours. Plenty of people who would have been aghast to hear that Maud Blyth had taken herself off to a house party wearing her crepe, too, even if they knew about the Blyth children and their need to kick back against their parents’ obsession with reputation.
“Of course,” Edwin said. “Would you let Miss Anne know that Mr. Edwin Courcey is here to offer his condolences?” How on Earth had he managed to exist without calling cards before now?
By not bothering to have any social acquaintances, he reminded himself.
The butler carried the message and Edwin stood in the entrance hall wondering if any of the clocks in this house—oak-hearted or otherwise—had stopped at the moment of Reggie’s death. He suspected not; this was a modern townhouse, lacking in history, and Reggie had met his end elsewhere. Or so one assumed.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said when he sat down with Anne Gatling.
Anne nodded. She looked tired and stiff. She looked like a doll enchanted to do those exact things in response to those exact words: to sit, to nod, to say thank you.
“Have you heard anything about the circumstances surrounding his death?”
Anne looked at her hands. Edwin wished for half of Robin’s compassion and ease. Surely he could have made that sound less intrusive.
“Pulled out of the river,” she said. “The Coopers visited with Mama again yesterday, but all they know is that it was probably magic that killed him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Edwin again.
She gave herself a small shake. “Dashed inconvenient; we’ve had to put the wedding back, of course. Saul’s been a brick. Such a help to Mama.”
“I meant to ask about Saul and that clock of yours. Did he get it working again?”
“The—oh, yes, he did,” said Anne. “He followed the instructions that you left, to pour magic into the mechanism, and for a few days it worked as well as it ever did.” She made a small face. “And then it went odd again. Saul said it couldn’t have been the power, in that case.”
Edwin folded his fingers under themselves as they tried to twitch. He was so close. He didn’t know whether the second ring was draining the clock’s heart, somehow, or simply throwing it all out of balance, but with any luck he’d be able to study it and find out.
“Is it wrapped in blankets in the linen cupboard, then?”
“No, we sent it to the thaumhorologist. We won’t see it for weeks, and it’ll cost a pretty penny, but it’s the last step before Dora loses patience and guts it to use as a jewellery-box.”
Edwin thought quickly. “I’ve had another thought about what could be wrong,” he said, which was absolutely true. “I’d be happy to try and fix it. If not, of course I’d leave it in the specialist’s hands.”
Anne shrugged. “If you like.”