Robin had another meeting. This one was with Martin Gunning; the man of business looked unflatteringly surprised that Robin had sought him out, instead of once again postponing. Hiding. Robin made himself pay attention to the numbers, floated the house-selling idea and was rewarded with a slow nod from Gunning, and emerged from the meeting feeling flattened. His head was aching again. Probably there was an imbued tea that would be able to fix that.
A smile dragged at the corners of Robin’s mouth as he remembered Edwin sipping tea and expressing his surprise that Robin hadn’t hit him across the face and stormed back to London. Always, with Edwin, that surprise. The wariness. The vivid expectation of abandonment; the bone-deep resignation to the fact that he would lose the things he wanted, or else never deserved them in the first place.
“Oh, bloody sodding hell,” Robin muttered, and went to find his coat.
Maud was right. He didn’t want to give it all up. He wanted to be fascinated. Perhaps he and Edwin Courcey could never be anything more than uneasy curios to each other, but Edwin was still the member of the magical world that Robin trusted the most, and in the space of two weeks Robin had tumbled into something that he wasn’t prepared to give up without a fight. And he was good at fighting.
He’d drag an apology out of Edwin and then . . . then he’d insist that they start over. Try again. No more lies.
He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. If he hurried, he’d be able to make it to the Home Office; Miss Morrissey was his only lead. She knew everything. He’d have laid down a month’s income that she knew Edwin’s address. Robin informed a footman that he was going out, donned coat and gloves, adjusted the angle of his hat like a medieval knight perfecting the tilt of his visor before a chivalric quest, and walked out the front door.
Adelaide Morrissey was down on the street, gathering her skirts to climb the steps of the townhouse.
They stared at each other for a few stultifying seconds, during which Miss Morrissey collected a faint spray of gutter-water from a passing carriage and two double-glances at the colour of her skin. Then Robin managed to say, “Er, won’t you . . . come in?”
The third of Robin’s Friday meetings was, at least, far from boring. Miss Morrissey strode her way into the house, brandished Robin’s resignation letter in his face right there in the entrance hall, and emitted a worried-sounding spiel about the fact that Edwin had taken her ring and gone off to find out if it was actually part of the Last Contract by looking for another ring, and he’d promised to come back and tell her as soon as he discovered anything and now it was a full day later—
“And I’ve been glued to the desk all day in case he turned up, but it’s not as if anything more important could be keeping him, and I’m—” She took a deep breath, and her mouth crinkled with concern. “He wouldn’t let me go with him because it was too dangerous, as if he knew the first thing about dealing with danger, and I don’t know where the Gatlings live—I’ve never met them—and now I’m worried he’s going to end up dead and dragged from the river, just like Reggie.” She said something else, a fluid muttering in a foreign language that had the clear intonation of being unladylike.
Fear soaked Robin like rain. A vision struggled up from the cracks of memory, one of those from the brief lucid period when he’d tried to direct the foresight: Edwin, lying pale and lifeless on the ground, surrounded by people—
No. No.
“How can we find him?”
“I was hoping you might have an idea about that,” she said. “That’s why I’ve come here. You’re the one who’s spent all that time with him, and to be frank, there’s nothing like a man with a title to open doors when you’re—” Miss Morrissey paused. She raised a hand to her mouth and tapped a finger there, a calculating motion. Her gloves were a startling shade of red.
“What?” Robin burst out.
“I’m not supposed to know this. We’d be breaking a few rules.”
“Good,” said Robin at once. “I mean, I don’t care.”
She nodded. “We need to go to the Barrel.”
“Sir Robert?” said his housekeeper, Mrs. Hathaway, from the top of the stairs. “If you—ah. Beg pardon, sir.” She folded her hands in front of her apron and descended like a queen, gaze locked onto Robin in a way that meant she’d already seen Miss Morrissey and was pointedly containing herself. “I’d heard you were going out. Will you be dining at home?”
“We were just leaving,” said Robin, conveniently still clad in outdoors gear. “As for dinner, ah . . .”
“I shall personally ensure that Sir Robert sends word,” said Miss Morrissey, “if he is delayed a minute later than planned.”
Her posh voice had somehow acquired a heavy gilt frame of further poshness. Mrs. Hathaway’s eyes widened. Robin didn’t trust himself to do more than nod. Then they were out the door and on the street.
“Sherborne Girls,” Miss Morrissey said after a moment. “If you were about to ask me where I learned to do that.”
Robin laughed, and a fraction of his tension eased with it. “By the time that’s made its way through the downstairs dining room, they’ll be saying I’ve taken up with the granddaughter of a maharajah.”
“What makes you think you haven’t?”
Humour quivered in the corner of her mouth, but Robin had a hard-earned sense for jokes that weren’t really jokes at all. “Honestly?”
The quiver expanded. “Not quite. He was—there’s no word for it in English, but my grandfather was a senior in the magical community in the Punjab before he came to England, and his sister did marry a prince. Mama used to tell us she’d come down in the world, marrying a mere colonel.”
The morning’s fog had grudgingly lifted, but the gloom of it hung in the darkening air. Miss Morrissey told him about her parents as they walked: her grandfather had lugged his family to England for what was meant to be a brief visit, due to the conditions of a will being contested. By the time the legal dispute over the property in question had dragged on for years, the man had become a sort of diplomatic liaison to the British Magical Assembly, and his daughter had met and married Colonel Clive Morrissey in a whirl of minor scandal. The Morrisseys had never been truly rich, or truly accepted in fashionable circles; they had their own circle of magician-peers, like the Courceys did, and moved quietly within that. Both of the daughters of the family had gained a taste for independence at school and had gone straight into civil service.
“It was that or marry at once,” said Miss Morrissey, “and both of us wanted to take a breath before we embarked on that. I’m glad,” she added. “Reggie’s—Reggie was a lot of fun to work with, even if he was prone to haring off around the country on no notice.”
“Were you close, the two of you?”
The rhythm of Miss Morrissey’s steps faltered. Her profile was burnished in the light of the streetlamps. “As close as any friend,” she said. “We worked together for two years. We both knew what it was like to grow up with magic and not have any ourselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Robin said, honestly. “For your loss.”
Her mouth spasmed. Robin wished for the first time that he could have met his predecessor, to work out for himself if this irresponsible man had in any way deserved the subdued longing of two clever people. Perhaps he’d had a smile like a sunrise.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be quite all right if I can land a kick on one of the bastards who did it.”
Robin had a swell of fellow-feeling. “We haven’t had much luck at unearthing them. We don’t know how many men—er, or women—are involved.”
“They’re men.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if even a single woman was involved, they wouldn’t have decided that a man who’d been working there one day was a more likely source of information than a woman who’d been there for years.”
It was a good point. Miss Morrissey looked almost offended that she hadn’t been accosted and cursed.