Geiger’s face creased around his smile when he saw the book in Edwin’s hand, and he pulled out brown paper and string to wrap it. “Knew you’d appreciate that one, sir,” he said. “Got it in a box of donations two days ago. Thought I’d leave you the pleasure of finding it your own self.”
Edwin next ducked into another bookshop, this one even shabbier in appearance. Here he made an offhand comment about the weather, which was answered with a solemn nod and the slide of a much slimmer book, this one already brown-papered, across the counter.
The Cavendish was serving lunch in the dining room by the time Edwin returned home. He ate and took his purchases up to his rooms, which had been cleaned, with a fire lit in the largest grate. Fresh-laundered clothes hung in the wardrobe and lay folded neatly in the dresser. Edwin could have afforded his own valet, and his rented suite included a modest servant’s quarters, but at university he’d fallen out of the habit of being so closely attended. What he’d fallen into instead was the habit of enclosed privacy and quiet, and he’d no intention of fishing himself out of it. The Cavendish was well staffed and accustomed to catering to the needs of bachelors.
He cracked the window of his sitting room. Rain-washed air refreshed his face. Along with it came the noise of the city, but this was distant and familiar enough that Edwin would stop hearing it within minutes. He made tea and burned his finger on the kettle, and begrudged the amount of magic it took him to heal it and avoid the annoyance of having his cradling string rub against the sore spot for the next week.
The smaller of his two book parcels, when unwrapped, held a thin purple volume that was closer to a glorified pamphlet. Edwin opened it to a random page and read enough for his lips and his cock to twitch in unison, then set it aside and took the book from Geiger’s to his favourite velvet armchair in front of the fire.
Normally he’d have sunk into the dry, fascinating words as gratefully as he’d sunk into the atmosphere of the bookshop itself. He found it difficult today. The bruises from the visit to Reggie’s family were starting to smart: the pity, the familiarity, the blatant mirroring of Edwin’s own disgust at what he was compared to what he should be. Little wonder that the unmagical Reggie, like Edwin, had borne the expense of living outside his family home in London, and visited them so seldom.
And on top of that, tomorrow Edwin would have to go back to Whitehall and deal with Blyth again.
At least that would be a limited irritation. Edwin would explain the mistake to the Minister. Blyth would be given a cup of tea and sent back to his own life. Someone more suitable would be found in the interim. And eventually Reggie would reappear, and laugh at Edwin for worrying over nothing.
Edwin ran his eyes twice more over the page and then, when the words refused to line themselves up and be seen, replaced the sweep of his sight with that of a fingertip, finding pleasure in the tiny roughness of the paper. Edwin’s collection of small enjoyments was carefully cultivated. When he exhaled his worry he imagined it going up in the snap of the fire. He thought about the meticulous cogs of the Gatlings’ clock, and the particular hazel of Sir Robert Blyth’s eyes.
In the gaps between small things, Edwin could feel his quiescent magic like a single drop of blood in a bucket of water: more obvious than it deserved to be, given its volume. He could breathe into the knots in the back of his neck. And he could feel out the edges of the aching, yearning space in his life that no amount of quiet and no number of words had yet been able to fill.
Edwin had no idea what he ached for, no real sense of the shape of his ideal future. He only knew that if every day he made himself a little bit better—if he worked harder, if he learned more, more than anyone else—he might find it.
The attack came while Robin was thinking about roast beef.
Charlotte Street was full of rattling wheels and scuffing feet as he walked home from his boxing club. The day’s rain had cleared into a sullenly overcast sky. Robin’s wrist ached from where he’d let annoyance and the brain-spinning impact of the day—magic, magic—distract him during his last bout against Lord Bromley. Scholz, the scowling German ex-champion who owned the boxing club, had treated Robin to a heavily accented diatribe on keeping his wrists and shoulders at the correct angle.
Roast beef. With potatoes crisped at the edges and fluffy on the inside, and golden Yorkshire pudding, and a savoury drape of gravy over the whole.
Robin sighed. No doubt the dinner at home would be fine, but the club only did that particular roast on Mondays. On a normal evening he’d have much preferred to join the group of his friends going directly from the boxing ring to the club’s dining room, then head home late enough into the night that he could dodge whatever conversations were waiting for him.