“He attached a note explaining that you’d removed the curse, and asking me to make sure the right person saw the letter,” said Miss Morrissey.
A stilted pause. Edwin looked up.
She added, “You knew he was going to resign?” It was a question like those asked by tutors who knew they’d found the holes in your argument and were advancing with fingers ready to be shoved through the fabric of it.
“Yes,” Edwin said. The pain of that final parting in the library landed on the impossible bruise of him, and he endured it.
“Hm. At least he remembered that I exist. I wasn’t sure if I’d get a letter at all, or merely another new face in the office one morning. Or you, coming in to tell me not to react if I ever encountered him on the street.”
There were a host of new probing questions buried in that. Edwin ignored them and pointed an accusing finger.
“You sent his sister to my family,” he said.
The corner of Miss Morrissey’s mouth rose. “I was tempted to tag along myself, simply to watch the theatre of it, but someone had to stay here and get the actual work done. The letters do pile up, even the crackpot ones. And you owe me your report, Mr. Courcey. One can’t be a liaison all on one’s own.”
Edwin looked back at Robin’s letter. The significance of its presence struck him. “You haven’t lodged this with Secretary Lorne.”
“The Secretary is still on leave.”
Another pause. This one was punctuated by the rapid, nervy tap of Miss Morrissey’s silver ring against the inlaid leather of the desk.
“I owe you my report? I suppose we’re calling that the chair of plausible deniability,” said Edwin, nodding at the empty chair next to hers.
Miss Morrissey’s cheeks darkened a slight amount. “Do you think Prime Minister Asquith will notice I’m not an Oxford-educated baronet, if I wander in next Wednesday and give him the briefing?”
“Cambridge,” said Edwin. “I’ve no idea, I’ve not met the man.”
“Perhaps I can pretend I’m Sir Robert under a spell,” said Miss Morrissey. “It’s not as though he’d be able to prove otherwise. And I can do this job, Mr. Courcey. I can do it very well.”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Edwin, and he hadn’t. She’d been doing it for months. He dug in his leather document bag and pulled out the pile of notes from the Barrel. “Here. Collate away. And show me what you have.”
Miss Morrissey smiled and handed him a few handwritten sheets, neatly arranged under headings. Edwin settled in and read about the usual cluster of novelties, hysterias, and possible brewing troubles. The office combed the newspapers but also had sources in a handful of newsrooms and tabloids, and there was no report that the excitable daughter of a baronet had approached anyone to try and sell the story of her brief sojourn in a manor house full of magicians. Not that Edwin had expected it. If Robin said Maud was to be trusted, then Edwin would trust her.
Miss Morrissey waved her pen in front of Edwin’s eyes. He’d been sitting sideways in the chair, staring at one of the filing cabinets, thinking.
“Hmm?”
“So are you going to tell me what it was all about?” she asked. “The curse? The men who attacked Sir Robert?”
Edwin turned the word trust in his mind a few times more. Half of him wanted to keep everything contained and secret, but he’d developed an unfamiliar liking for having an ally. He’d spent his lifetime feeling worthless around other magicians, and yet unable to separate himself from magic in the way that Hawthorn had. It had left him walking a sort of ditch between road and field, brushing each side of the world, quite desperately alone, waiting for a better future while taking no steps to find one. He’d thought he was content with it.
He wondered for the first time what Adelaide Morrissey felt, the nature of the ditch that she walked in, having grown up surrounded by magic and passed her awakening-age without manifesting even the smallest drop of it. In Reggie this lack had manifested as a buoyant, curious hunger. In this woman—well, Edwin had no idea.
He touched the pocket where his string lay. Take a risk. Just try.
“Fetch us a pot of tea,” he suggested. “It’s a long story.”
Even without the parts that Edwin kept to himself, tucked away in his palm like the tingling press of lips, it took them the entire pot and a plate of currant-studded biscuits to get through it. Miss Morrissey’s eyes widened and widened. She was restless by the end, taking her final biscuit on a wander about the room, holding it crumb-dropping between her teeth as she poked through the bookshelves. Edwin thought it was an aimless expression of anxiety until he finished—with a much-edited version of Robin and Maud’s exit, lingering on the positive fact of the curse’s absence—and Miss Morrissey immediately said, “These people came here. They searched the office.”