“Yes. Though we’re being credited with either more skill or more luck than we’ve had. The man who got in upstairs asked Hawthorn where the knife and the cup were.”
A vaguely depressed silence reigned over the breakfast table. The Last Contract, physical symbol of the fae bargain that centuries ago left magic in the hands of humans, existed as three disguised silver objects. The coin, which had last been seen in the hands of Edwin’s brother, Walter Courcey. The cup, which Violet and Maud had successfully bluffed their way into keeping, on board the Lyric. Since then their enemies had obviously worked out that they’d been left holding a fake.
And the knife. Which quite possibly looked nothing like a knife at present. And which had belonged to Spinet’s previous mistress, Lady Enid; and had therefore been inherited by Violet herself.
Which would be all very well if they could find the damned thing. Spinet was a more difficult house than the average to search from top to bottom. Not least because top and bottom, as well as the points of the compass and many other aspects of spatial geometry, seemed in several parts of the house to be treated more as guidelines than rules.
Jack had grown up on an old magical estate that adhered to old traditions. Spinet House was a young thing, built by a master carpenter-thaumoluthier and his energetically creative wife.
It was a fortress. It was a musical, magical puzzle box.
It was a fucking headache.
And it was partly Jack’s headache, at least until the business of the Last Contract was over. Every day was one day closer to Jack being allowed to escape back to his own townhouse and his old life, where he could once again pretend that magic didn’t exist.
“We should do some more work on the ley lines,” Edwin said to Violet, breaking the silence.
“I thought there weren’t any near here,” said Violet. “Or have you dug out an even older and dustier map to bore me with?”
“Violet,” said Maud.
Violet’s head turned in an irritated motion, as if she were on the verge of snapping at Maud, too, but she caught herself. “Sorry, Edwin. It’s been a busy morning.”
Edwin accepted the apology with as much grace as it had been offered with: not a great deal on either side. The Blyth siblings had the stubbornness of two people who had each adopted a stray cat with a terrible personality and were determined to have them cohabit. They’d made progress. But nobody could yet describe the reserved Edwin and the deliberately extravagant Violet as friendly.
“There aren’t any ley lines that cross Spinet, no, but we know that the knife will be exerting an effect on those close by,” said Edwin. “And I’ve been experimenting with the major London nodes of the line that runs longitudinally through Sutton—I really do think there’s something there, some trick we’re missing that will allow us to stretch the problem of distance—”
And he was off, his own sleepless night apparently not making a whit of difference now that he’d sunk his teeth into an intellectual problem. Both Blyths were listening to him—one with the same green-eyed interest that she swept over the entire world, and the other with the comfortably besotted gaze that said Edwin could be speaking Chinese, or Old French, or the forgotten language of the fae, and Robin would be just as happy to bask in the simple sound of his beloved’s voice.
Jack was bored to tears by the time words like remote catalyst started marching alarmingly through Edwin’s sentences. He met Adelaide’s eye, and she quirked her mouth at him, but was either too loyal or too involved in demolishing her pile of eggs to show him any more sympathy.
Violet, the supposed target of Edwin’s monologue, was the one who cast Jack a speaking glance. She set down her teacup and cradlespoke help needed at him.
Edwin broke off from one sentence to the next. His hand slipped out of Robin’s. His eyes were on the door, behind Jack’s shoulder.
Jack turned in time to see Mr. Price enter the room with more speed and less calm than usual. Spinet House’s butler had a fussy elegance to him, like an orchestra conductor eternally on the verge of lifting his baton and frowning at the brass section.
“You’ve a visitor, miss,” he said to Violet. “A journalist, from the papers. I told him to stay in the hall, but he didn’t, and he somehow pushed right through—”
Right through the private wards, one assumed. Not something you could blurt out in front of the average unmagical person. The butler let the words die in his throat as this person—probably not even average, certainly much shorter than Price—slipped through the doorway behind him and took a few steps into the room before stopping, gaze dragged to the covered salvers on the sideboard, as if business had been momentarily postponed by the smell of bacon.
Disapproval wafted from every inch of Mr. Price, who cradled a spell before anyone could speak. Jack couldn’t see what it was—perhaps something designed to subdue the intruder for long enough that he could be escorted firmly back to the door.
Belatedly Violet said, “It’s all right, Price, he’s—”
The green spell had already left the butler’s hands like a handful of hornets. The short young man gave a shake of his black hair and a twitch of one shoulder as if he really had been stung, and frowned.
Two green sparks flew back towards Price’s hands. The butler shook his fingers and made an affronted sound of surprise.
In the ensuing pause, Edwin stood, eyes narrowed. Transparently on the verge of saying Do that again, where I can see it properly.
“Unbusheled,” finished Violet with a sort of laugh. “Thank you, Price. We know him.”
“Do we?” said Robin.
The young man in question looked around the breakfast room. He hadn’t changed. He still looked like a graven angel that had stepped down from the entrance to a church, shaken off the greyness of stone, and decided to go about the world clad in restless flesh and dark, dark eyes.
Those eyes slid over Jack in their tour of the room, and the back of Jack’s neck tensed in preparation for an argument.
“How d’you do. So, do you welcome all your morning visitors by hurling magic at them, Miss Debenham,” said Alanzo Rossi, “or only members of the press?”
3
If he tried to list every question he had about the more baffling aspects of upper-class life, Alan would run out of fingers, toes, and probably pubic hairs and stars in the sky as well.
Fairly high on the list, however, was: Why breakfast?
If you lived the sort of life where a small army of people was responsible for fetching your food, setting it in front of you, and then hovering near the wall to replenish or replace as needed, what was the point of abandoning that habit for one single meal of the day? Alan could only assume it was a daily exercise in which the rich and lofty entertained delusions that they’d be any use at all if thrown into a world where they had to fend for themselves.