He underlined his uncle and cousin’s names, trying to think of his hand as something separate to himself, and then set the pencil down.
“Ask,” he said. “I’ll tell you some lies.”
He wasn’t surprised that it was Maud who spoke first.
“So, my lord. May we assume that you maintain excellent relations with your”—she consulted the paper—“uncle? And your cousin.”
“I have the utmost respect for them both,” said Jack. “We’ve kept in frequent contact over the past sixteen years. It pains me extremely that my uncle passed away some years back, after being in very poor health since—” But despite his trying to speak quickly, as if to outrun the racing hounds of the secret-bind, he couldn’t finish the sentence once it tipped towards truth.
“Since,” echoed Edwin. He traced the thick lines that Jack had drawn. “Don’t try to nod. Just tap on the table if I’m wrong. Bastoke senior and George were both involved in what happened to Elsie. And it had something to do with pooling magical power.” His voice, too, sped up and nearly stumbled. “Even then, that’s what the Bastokes wanted. They were trying to draw on someone else’s magic. And of course they’d try with you and Elsie—direct blood relations, who out of anyone would seem to have magic to spare.”
“Did these people kill your sister?” said Alan quietly.
Hearing it filled Jack with the sort of wild, despairing anger he hadn’t felt in years. The anger he’d been hiding from when he refused to follow his mother through the gate in Cheetham’s gardens. He couldn’t repress a small shudder. Did John kill Elsie? Yes. No.
“Too big,” said Maud, watching him. “Someone try a specific.”
Violet was pale, but she said baldly: “Did one of them push her off the roof?”
Alan made a small jerk of a movement, then subsided.
Jack exhaled. No secret-bind kept him from speaking about that event in particular. Only a deep reluctance to touch it, even in passing. He’d walled this memory away and hoped he could thereby make it vanish.
“No. She’d been … secluded, for the months leading up to it. Unwell. And even though I didn’t have magic, I felt what happened to the Cheetham land when—” He closed his eyes. It didn’t help. He flattened his voice utterly, as if he could wrench himself away from his body and let it, piece of flesh that it was, speak the words without his having to feel them. “I don’t have any reason to believe that anyone else was there, or that anyone else caused it. When she jumped.”
“We all knew she’d been unwell for a long time,” said Violet. “But nobody knew exactly what happened. You said magic goes back in tainted, or … not at all.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” said Robin. “That’s what happened to your magic?”
At least it was Robin. There was sympathy on his face, but it was the firm kind that Jack could bear. Jack didn’t nod. He didn’t tap the table either.
“And Elsie’s?” said Edwin.
Jack managed a convulsive shake of his head before the bind punished him for it. Even if he could have explained it in the face of his parents’ ever-more-desperate questions, back when it first happened, he wouldn’t have known where to begin. Elsie never lost her magic the same way that he did. But she was lost to him and lost to the life—the brilliant, unprecedented life—that she should have lived.
“They obviously didn’t have the Last Contract to use.” Edwin stared at Jack as if at a live coal fallen from the grate. Clearly imagining the horror of being what Jack was. “That might have been what went wrong.”
Jack couldn’t answer that. Perhaps his magic and Elsie’s had truly mingled, and perhaps they hadn’t. His uncle had determined that they would never know. He had a sudden and very sharp image of splintered, blackened fingernails, and was abruptly done with this. It wasn’t helping.
“I can’t tell you the details,” he said. “You will, as daunting as the prospect seems, simply have to trust me. Trust me that this is too dangerous for anyone to be allowed to experiment with it. And even if it wasn’t—George and Walter and the others have killed several people to make this possible. Do you really think they’ll step back with a shrug if the majority of British magicians decide to withhold consent when asked? Violet?”
“No.” Violet looked flattened. “Fuck.”
“So we’re decided,” said Adelaide. “High theft it is.”
* * *
The planning took them further into the night than any of them expected. Edwin ended up with a list of further questions for Adelaide to take to Kitty, with apologies.
Maud kept sneaking hopeful looks at Alan, as if he might bestow gems of criminal wisdom upon them, but Alan didn’t seem inclined to contribute. Nor was he needed to play a part in the scheme itself.
He didn’t leave, though. At one point, when Adelaide and Robin were arguing over the location of a specific office, Alan slid Edwin’s open notebook toward himself and tore out a few pages in order to sit there, head and shoulders bent over the paper, scribbling steadily away. Jack hoped like hell that what he was writing was journalistic in nature, because the idea of the Roman sitting across the table from Jack and openly working on a story about—about—
Jack wrenched his thoughts away from that and back to the planning at hand.
Violet offered rooms for the night to anyone who wanted them, but Adelaide was expected home and Robin wouldn’t let her go unescorted, and Edwin went where Robin went. And Alan said, “I like your house, Violet, but I don’t think it likes me enough for that,” and left by the front door with his head high.
Jack, yawning in the doorway with Violet, had an unnerving flash as if seeing sideways into a life that he might have had: marrying Violet, making her Baroness Hawthorn, and farewelling their guests together after an evening party.
He glanced at her, luminous with her yellow hair and lavishly adorned blue gown. Perhaps she was imagining it, too, because she met his eyes and let out a tiny laugh.
“Lord Hawthorn.” Alan was halfway down the steps. He gestured with his head down to the street. “Can I have a word?”
Jack followed. The nearest streetlamp was only yards away, casting dense shadows of leaves onto the stones of the street and making a pool of light that Alan stepped into. This conversation was to be private but not unseen.
Jack raised his eyebrows—Well?
Alan looked up at Jack and touched his fingertips to his own lower lip. Desire slipped through Jack at the sight, but most of him was a mess of feelings stirred up like the bottom of a pond. Anger and grief and loss were clouding him and would take time to settle again. And his fucking leg ached.
So he was not in the mood to be reminded of Alan Ross’s mouth. He was ready to put the man down, sharply, when—
“How much did it hurt?” Alan asked. “When they put it on you in the first place.”
Ah.