So Edwin, again, said nothing.
“Right,” said Robin, “that’s what I thought,” and picked up his bags and left.
Len Geiger had already asked twice if there was anything he could help Edwin find, which was a new record. Asking once was generally a polite hint that he was hoping to close the bookshop and get home to his family. Asking twice, when it was barely past noon, might have meant that he was afraid for Edwin’s health or sanity.
There was nothing wrong with Edwin’s health. The scratches were healing, and he’d dropped by Whistlethropp’s shop that morning and picked up a lotion to hasten the process. Similarly, his mind was working as well as it ever had. And that was that. Body and mind: perfectly hale. There was nothing else about him, no other component to feel bruised beyond easy repair, and so rationality dictated that he could not feel that way.
Edwin sighed and closed the book he’d been leafing through without seeing the words. He added it to the pile he’d been amassing: everything he could find that referred to casting spells on living plants, a few entirely unmagical titles on horticulture—the part of Geiger’s shop not located behind the mirror made up the bulk of the man’s sales, after all—and a few others that had shown up in the bibliography of the Kinoshita translation. It made quite a pile. Edwin arranged for them to be sent to Sutton Cottage; part of him itched to begin reading immediately, but he’d already sent a message promising to return to Sutton the following week and sit down properly with the senior house staff and groundskeepers. It looked as though he was going to be spending a lot more time in the country.
It was Thursday. Edwin had returned to London the previous day, leaving shortly after Robin and Maud. There’d seemed no reason to stay. Being alone with Bel’s friends had been abruptly as unbearable as it usually was; there was nobody to insulate him from them at the dining table, and nobody to come and find him, to coax conversation and smiles from him, if he decided to spend all his time in the library.
It didn’t take long to become so accustomed to something that you could describe the exact shape of its absence.
From the bookshop, Edwin walked to Whitehall with his attention on the small sensations of the city, which he’d missed. The presence of real noise, human and mechanical. The constant movement. Glass and metal and stone, and splashes of nature kept within gardens and parks, and the turning colours of the trees in their framing rows. The air had the thick clamminess that signalled fog would climb the streets from the river that night.
The external typist’s room in the Office of Special Domestic Affairs and Complaints was empty. A rustling noise punctuated by singing, in no language Edwin knew, came from behind the door standing narrowly ajar.
The singing halted and Miss Morrissey looked up as Edwin pushed the door open. She nearly stood, too, but rose only a few inches before recognising her visitor and sinking back down.
“Mr. Courcey.” She’d drawn a second chair around to the business side of Robin’s desk, nudging the larger one off-centre. The piles of papers looked rather more organised than previously. She had a pen in her hand.
“Good—afternoon, Miss Morrissey.”
“Sir Robert isn’t here.”
“I know.”
Only when he said it did he realise he’d been hoping otherwise. He’d followed his usual routine, telling himself he was still the Assembly liaison, after all. He’d ducked into the Barrel that morning to pick up the thin sheaf of notes that had been accumulating in his personal pigeonhole. And here he was, doing his job, draping himself in the normality of it like a cloak and hiding his irrational hope beneath.
Miss Morrissey pulled out a drawer and retrieved yet another piece of paper, which she pushed towards him. Edwin took the seat opposite, where he’d sat not even two weeks previous, when he’d been full of irritation at Reggie’s replacement. It felt as though every cell in his body had replaced itself over that span of days, silent and individually unnoticed, forming something the exact shape as the old Edwin that nonetheless resonated at a different frequency.
The piece of paper was Robin’s letter of resignation. It was brief, polite, and uninformative. Regret to inform. Unsuited to the requirements of the position. Cognisant of the honour of being appointed in the first place.
Cognisant? Edwin mouthed, halfway to forming some kind of tease about Robin of all people using a word like that, but he had nobody to speak it to.
Robin had addressed the letter to the office itself because, Edwin assumed, he didn’t want it landing in front of the Healsmith fellow who’d shoved him mistakenly into the post in the first place.