Walt would only deign to follow a man who outstripped him in pure power, and there weren’t a great many of those. Edwin thought wistfully of the truth-spell he’d managed the previous day. But Walt had watched him dress, watched him pack; he had no string to hand, and even if he did, he’d hardly be able to build something that complex without Walt noticing and stopping him. Walt wasn’t Billy.
Edwin’s heart gave a queer hiccup as though an echo-spell were trying to take place within his ribs, showing him a past that might have been. Edwin hadn’t been recruited early to this conspiracy, despite being cleverer and more desperate and far more primed to swallow the hook of promised power than Reggie Gatling. Now he knew why. Walt wasn’t Billy. Billy was the one who had, belatedly, suggested Edwin as suitable.
It would never, not in the full length of his effortless life, have occurred to Walt that his younger brother might be worth anything at all.
Perhaps Edwin should be glad of that, bitter pill that it was. If these people had come to him before the murders, before anything had gone wrong—if they’d sold the quest for the Last Contract to him in the right intellectual light, it could have been so easy for Edwin to become what Reggie became.
Would he have clung, pathetically grateful, to the chance to finally be on Walt’s side, and thereby break their old and exhausting pattern of hurt and response?
Would he have stood by and watched a curse of pain laid on Sir Robert Blyth and told himself, dispassionate, that it was a means to a worthwhile end?
Edwin didn’t know. He felt dunked in cool and unclean water.
“I have a question,” said Robin to Walt. “Did you tell Billy Byatt to kill me? Once you realised at dinner, the first night, that I didn’t know anything about the contract?” He’d donned the mild, pleasant expression that Edwin could now recognise as Robin’s version of armour.
Walt raised his eyebrows. “Kill you at Penhallick?”
“Of course not,” said Edwin.
“What?” said Robin.
“Guest-right,” said Edwin. “Having a guest die on pledged land makes the land . . . unsettled. And Walt visits Penhallick a lot oftener than I do.”
“Easy enough to wait until you got back to London,” said Walt. “And thank goodness we kept you alive, hm? Foresight’s a rare thing for us to have stumbled across.” He was eyeing Robin with satisfaction, as Bel eyed people and objects she wished to collect, though without even a spark of Bel’s tempering merriment.
Edwin pressed his leg against Robin’s, as much of a warning and comforting touch as he would allow himself. Simply existing in the same space as Robin felt like holding a flame close to a fuse. Apart from the moment of relief in the aftermath of Billy’s death, they’d not been given time to settle anything; the fight that they’d parted with still hung over them, fragile as glass. And Edwin was a ghastly bubble of fear that Walt, too, would see what Billy had seen. Would realise that he didn’t need truth-spells or curses or anything of the sort to make Edwin do whatever he wanted, so long as Robin was there to be hurt.
The rest of the journey was quiet.
The closest stop to Sutton Cottage was in a large enough town that they easily found a hackney coach to take them to the estate itself. The driver was eager to tell them how they’d all wondered if the house was going to close to tourists after the old lady had passed, not that anyone ever saw her, famous recluse she’d been, God rest her soul, and had they been there before? They had? What did they think of the hedge maze?
Edwin had forgotten the estate warding entirely until Walter began to stir, frowning. “I don’t like the feel of this,” Walt said. “You two are—deceiving me, somehow. The coin won’t be here.”
“This’ll pass,” said Edwin wearily. “Hold tight, Walt.”
“Think of England,” put in Robin, not at all pleasantly.
Walter showed no intention of holding tight. By the time they turned onto the long driveway he was half-standing, jabbing his finger in Edwin’s face. “Turn around. You bloody little pest, tell him to turn this around.”
Edwin’s heart shoved cold water through his veins. He wanted to hide. “Walt—”
“Courcey,” snapped Robin, actually grabbing at Walt’s arm.
“Stop!” Walt shouted, all the force of his personality behind it, and the carriage settled to a halt.
Edwin managed not to choke on the irony of it all. He didn’t want them to keep going. He didn’t want Walter to have anything he wanted. And yet, he did.
The stronger the magician, the stronger the warding, and now Walter had no tracking spell to trump the wards. Edwin didn’t think they’d manage to drag Walt over the elm-tree boundary with haste, as Robin and the Daimler had managed to drag Edwin.
Edwin opened the door of the coach and stepped onto the road. He walked past the line of elms and felt the moment when the estate awoke to him, the air suddenly fresher and more alive in his lungs. I’m sorry, he thought, miserable. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
“This is my brother, Walter Courcey.” He couldn’t manage the words he is welcome. “I am inviting him onto these lands.”
The staff of Sutton Cottage were startled to see Robin and Edwin again, so much sooner than Edwin had told them to expect him, but there was a glint of pleasure in Mrs. Greengage’s eye even as she over-apologised for the likely quality of dinner with the superbly passive-aggressive air of the expert.
Walt looked critically around the house. Edwin was afraid he’d demand a tour, but single-mindedness won out, and all three of them headed to the parlour as their bags were carried upstairs. Walt’s brow furrowed at the empty chair in which Flora Sutton had died. Edwin knew that look. Walt was looking for a triumph that would overwrite the failure he’d last experienced here.
Edwin, last into the room, touched the doorframe and again felt the ache of apology in his fingertips. If London was normal and Penhallick was a dull itch, then Sutton was like discovering that one had been breathing shallowly one’s entire life; that there was an extra inch of rib cage to be filled. It was new, it was still uncertain, but it welcomed him. Edwin felt vertiginous with it. Walt’s presence meant he managed not to show it on his face; he’d learned before he graduated into long trousers not to show either of his siblings the things that he valued, if he could possibly help it.
“Show me this secret study,” said Walt.
Edwin had left the rose pendant in a shadow box hanging on the parlour wall between two enormous floral embroidery samplers. The box was in the shape of a tree, with the trunk a series of stacked small windows. Edwin pulled the rose from the lowest of these, touched it to the mirror’s frame, and watched the glass dissolve.
The Rose Study was exceedingly cramped for three grown men, especially when one of them had shoulders like Robin’s. Walt called up a light and tethered it to the empty glass bowl on the desk, an old-fashioned style of guidekeeper. In the glow of it, mingling mellowly with the spill of daylight in from the parlour, Edwin looked around at the neatly shelved books and the polished floorboards, which suddenly seemed vulnerable; ready to be torn up. He remembered the destructive mess that he’d walked into in Reggie’s office—Robin’s office—the day after Robin was cursed. Walt would be methodical, but no less destructive.
“Where do we start?” Robin asked. “You did say you can’t do a spell to search for it, didn’t you?” Perhaps he was thinking about the wrecked office as well. It really was a shame that the objects were muffled against detection, because inability to define parameters— “Hold on,” said Edwin. He dragged pieces of thoughts around like a Latin sentence, until all the parts made tentative sense. “We don’t have to search for the contract in particular, or anything magical at all. We’re in a small space and we’re searching for silver.”