Again, Alan wanted to run far away, but this time it had nothing to do with magic and warding. He didn’t like what they were doing here: standing in a dead woman’s heart and pawing through the remains of her life in search of secrets and power. Even walking through a cemetery with Maud hadn’t felt this intrusive.
Even more than that, he wanted to run from the feeling of camaraderie that wrapped itself around him, seductive as a soft bed after a long day, the longer he worked with these people. It was starting to feel like he belonged there, respected and liked and allowed access to all these secret histories. He couldn’t afford that. And he didn’t want to afford the hurt that would come when it ended.
“Could the frame be the knife?” Violet asked. “Mrs. Sutton changed the coin into rings.”
“And the rings turned back to a coin with a rectification spell.” Edwin cradled again and applied it to the picture frame. Nothing happened.
Edwin’s fossicking thumbs led them next to a rounded box of very pale wood tucked beneath an armchair. Inside it was … another box. This one was made of silver, with pearls inlaid in the lid. Violet lifted it out gingerly, and Edwin cast the rectification, but it remained a box rather than a knife.
Inside that one was—
“Another wooden box,” said Jack. “Who’ll take a wager that there’ll be a smaller silver box inside?”
Violet cracked the lid. Jack would have lost the wager. The box was lined with red velvet, and inside it was a many-folded square of paper and a long lock of brown hair. Another keepsake from the dead son, perhaps.
The piece of paper, when unfolded, held two lines of hand-inked music. Violet blinked at it for a while, hummed experimentally, and said, “I don’t know. It looks like the start of a transposition exercise. The same tune in two keys.”
“Edwin, Violet,” said Jack. “Do you remember your lock ceremony?”
“Yes.” Edwin looked up sharply.
“What did the box look like?”
“Which box?” said Edwin. “For storage? I never saw it. The ceremony was at Penhallick. My parents had the lock sent to London for registration at the Barrel.”
Violet agreed that she, too, had undergone her lock ceremony at her family home. This was an aspect of magical culture that Alan already knew: at the first sign of showing magical ability, children had a lock of hair cut and sent to a room in the Barrel, where the locks could then be used to determine the location of any registered magician in times of peril. Robin and Adelaide had used it to locate Edwin, with Mrs. Kaur’s help.
“Our father took myself and Elsie in person to the Barrel, after ours.” It was the first time Alan had heard that name from Jack’s mouth. “They took us to the Lockroom and let us put our locks into their storage boxes.” He nodded at the velvet-lined box. “They looked like that. Exactly like.”
“But if … oh. Transposition. Oh, that’s genius.” Edwin looked torn between laughter and tugging his own hair out. He looked around at them all. “The good news is, I know where the knife is.”
Alan’s heart gave a painful skip. So. What he’d come here for was mostly accomplished. That was a good thing, it was, it was.
He said, “And the bad?”
A smile lurched into existence on half of Edwin’s mouth. “How do we feel about stealing something from the most magical location in England?”
12
Jack spent half of the following day at Westminster having conversations about the People’s Budget, unable to shake the echo of Alan’s voice in the back of his head while he did so. He then dropped in on his Mayfair townhouse, where Oliver was engaged in determinedly refreshing Jack’s wardrobe and cataloging its defects, to keep his word to his mother.
Jack’s illegitimate half brother was a pleasant boy. Too anxious-to-please to be genuinely sunny, but decent, and with a professional fussiness that was the stamp of all well-trained valets.
And Oliver oozed magic; there was no doubt about that. In the guise of preparing him to be a useful part of Spinet House’s defences, should they be attacked again, Jack began filling in some of the gaps in that part of Freddy Oliver’s training. Such as it was. Or … wasn’t.
Edwin had a passionate lecture tucked away about how strong magicians tended to be sloppy magicians, because they never needed to be painstaking in order to make a spell come out as they wanted. So they brute-forced through the basics and learned more elaborate or complex spells only if they were curious and methodical or their family put the effort into having them taught.
Walter Courcey might fall into the sloppy category, but George Bastoke didn’t. And neither did Jack himself, son of a Bastoke woman who’d insisted on her children being taught perfect control. Watching Oliver grow up with untrained Alston strength must have invoked a war between Lady Cheetham’s tact and her practicality. Jack was surprised she’d managed to hold off on taking charge of the boy’s education until now.
Once the magic lesson was done they returned to Spinet. Jack had Oliver make some adjustments to one of Jack’s old dinner suits, so that when Alan turned up to Spinet House with half an hour to spare before the dinner gong sounded, Jack could have the mean pleasure of saying: “No excuses this time, Master Cesare. You’re changing for dinner.”
Alan looked from Jack to Oliver and then back to Jack.
“If you bought me a suit of clothes, I will throw them out the window,” he said flatly.
“I wouldn’t dare. They’re castoffs. Fit only for the rag bin. Or you.”
Oliver made a noise of outraged pride, but all of Jack’s eyes were for the way Alan’s face came alive with challenge. For a hot, mad moment he wanted to give Oliver the evening off and personally peel Alan Ross out of that ink-stained shirt and the plain brown suit that was fighting to make him look pedestrian, anything less than extraordinary, and was failing miserably. How the hell does anyone get any work done with you in the office? Jack wanted to demand. No wonder his editors were happy to let him roam the streets and drop in only for deadlines.
“Your castoffs? I’ll swim in them.”
“Oliver would be a poor excuse for a magician-valet if he couldn’t adjust a suit to fit,” said Jack, and Oliver’s red hair bounced happily.
“I took a guess at the sizing, sir, but I can do the final touches once it’s on.”
Alan winced, probably at the sir, but Oliver’s earnestness seemed to be a weapon he hadn’t armed himself against. He submitted to being led upstairs to Jack’s own room, and sat down to dinner in what might have been the first suit ever to fit him properly in his life. He looked well groomed and lovely and radiantly grumpy about the whole business.
Maud and Adelaide showered him in compliments. Violet took one look at him and turned to fire a gleefully suggestive expression across the table to Jack.
Don’t, Jack cradlespoke at her.