“Right,” said Alan. “That’s why I’m here.”
Edwin beckoned him over to the desk, which was a sturdy masterpiece of carpentry. The edges undulated and swept into curlicues at the corners, with engraved ferny leaves bordering the dark leather surface. The wood’s warm, glossy polish made it look barely used. Something to be looked at. Something that sang of wealth.
Spread out atop it were sheets of drafting paper covered in lines and figures.
“Plans of the house?” asked Alan.
“Of a sort,” said Edwin. “I’m no architect. We’d hoped the original designs might be in James Taverner’s files, but we can’t find them. I made these with a sympathy spell.”
“Like how Maud found the silver on the Lyric,” said Violet. Bright lines cast on the wall; Alan remembered that too. “But Spinet’s fussier than an ocean liner.”
“That’s one word for it,” muttered Edwin. “The plans make even less sense than the house. The sympathy did the best it could, but … there are no passageways drawn where we know there are some. Two rooms overlaid on the same spot. Rooms that seem to be missing entirely.” He tapped the nearest piece of paper. “The missing bits are the most promising, if we’re looking for hiding places for the knife.”
“Most of the house’s magic has to do with access,” said Violet. “A lot of doors and rooms won’t open, or show you their full contents, unless you meet the right conditions. Or sing the right tune.” Rueful. “The staff know a lot, they’ve helped us fill things in, but much of Spinet was built expressly for Mr. and Mrs. Taverner. The last time I was here myself, I was sixteen. It seemed so different when Lady Enid lived here. And she knew all the tricks. There was a room you could stand in and whisper, and another room where someone could hear everything you said, clear as day.”
“And for all we know they might be different rooms, by now,” Edwin said. “Violet, I still think the orrery—”
Alan cleared his throat. He didn’t have all day, even if they did; he had a deadline to meet this afternoon and would already have to write faster than usual. But all the throat-clearing accomplished was to invite himself into what was clearly a well-worn dynamic. Violet turned a look of playful exasperation onto him.
“Edwin here hates anything that doesn’t make logical sense.”
“I own a magical house, Violet,” snapped Edwin. “I know their magic works by different rules. Sometimes no rules at all. By emotions.”
“Emotions! The enemy,” stage-whispered Violet.
Edwin had his hands splayed over the diagrams. His nail beds were pale, as if even this non-argument was the equivalent of someone throwing furniture around and raging. But he looked at Alan and said, in a level, tutorly voice, “The magic of those old estates and lands—it’s like a different language. But the Taverners made this house, only half a century ago, and they put all the magic in themselves. Most of what we’ve unearthed so far does have a logic to it. Not that it helps, necessarily.”
Violet said, “It’s like being invited to play cards at a table where everyone else knows the rules and you have to work them out as you go. But you … if magic really has less effect on you…”
“You want me to be a cheat’s mirror,” said Alan. “Let you see some of the cards, so you aren’t fleeced while you’re learning the rules.”
“Exactly,” said Violet.
It made sense. Alan had been trying to let all this detail glide over him, alert only for anything that he needed to tuck away for later, but he was interested despite himself. And wary all over again. He wondered what a magical house thought of a perturbator who was about to be used to pry into its secrets.
“And the stakes aren’t low,” said Violet, as if following his worries. She nodded to a wall of the parlour that backed onto the garden. “We tried to fold that wall out into a balcony, because there’s a painting in the master bedroom which shows it. Edwin did an opening-spell and it slid half the floorboards apart instead. He nearly broke his neck when it dumped him in the cellar.”
“I’m almost certain the cello and the double bass are key,” said Edwin. “I don’t suppose you play anything that comes with a bow?”
“Sorry,” said Alan. “Didn’t have time for music lessons, what with all the fencing and elocution and watercolour painting.”
Edwin blinked.
Violet grinned. “Maud and I are both respectable on the piano, but there’s not a fiddler amongst us. I know musicians and Edwin knows magicians, but we don’t want to drag anyone into this business who isn’t involved already.”
And here Alan was. Involved. He pulled the rosary from his pocket and told them what his ma had said about the family devils and the use of the rosary to banish them. Edwin’s eyes went wide, then narrowed in furious thought, and he pulled out a pen that began taking notes on its own while he fired questions at Alan about his childhood, any magic he might have accidentally used, and how it felt to handle the rosary. The answer to most of which was “I don’t remember.”
Edwin paused awkwardly, halfway to taking the rosary from Alan’s hands, as if hearing a voice reminding him to be polite. “May I?”
“What?” Alan was staring at the moving pen. Perhaps he could ask for one of those as part of his fee. But it was only taking dictation; the act of forming words with his hand was part of how Alan slowed his thoughts enough to arrange them into meaningful sentences. A neat thing, though. “Oh. Here.”
Edwin put the rosary on the desk, then gave Alan a hopeful look that was almost a smile.
“Now, this,” he said, “is a beautiful bit of magic.”
He pulled from his pocket a loop of twine and a solid beeswax disc the size of an egg, with the honeycomb pattern intact, set in a circular frame of pale wood.
“Violet, do you know where I put Mrs. Sutton’s wood monograph?”
“I never know where you put anything,” said Violet, but she began to sort through a stack of books.
Edwin cradled the string about his fingers until all his fingertips glowed dark blue. Ink-stained like Alan’s own. He touched first the wax and then his hovering pen, and the blue magic disappeared at once. Dropping the string, he touched the cross of the rosary to the centre of the wax for a few seconds. Then he carefully isolated two of the smaller beads and touched those to the wax in turn.
Alan waited for something dramatic to happen to his family heirloom. Nothing did.
Edwin gave an impatient twitch and picked up the paper on which the pen had, Alan realised, been writing. The words BEECH and ROWAN were there in a thick hand with Germanic flourishes to the letters.
“It … knows the wood?” Alan said. “How?”