Edwin wrenched his mind back around. “The day after they laid the curse on Robin? Yes.”
“For one reason or another, they think Reggie hid the contract—part of the contract—here. It’s why they thought Sir Robert would be able to find it.”
Edwin nodded and stood as well. The puzzle had its claws in him again, and it wasn’t just curiosity that made him want to keep picking at this despite the risks. The ember of his anger had never been extinguished. Walking towards danger was wildly unlike him, but perhaps he could pretend that Robin had passed on some of his courage like a talisman.
“Cup, knife, and coin,” Edwin said. “If we’re to believe the old story, which frankly I’m not sure we should. The hiding place in the statue was small. You couldn’t keep anything there larger than a fist.”
Miss Morrissey paused opening a box of newspapers. “Would it be dangerous to touch? Whatever it is?”
“Perhaps to non-magicians? No, Reggie carried it away with him. Let’s assume not.” A thought. “Could he have been carrying it with him? When he was—when he died?”
She blanched and twisted her ring, uncomfortable. “I don’t know. You could ask the Coopers.”
“No, that doesn’t work either. If the people looking for the contract killed him for being secret-bound, they’d surely have searched him afterwards.” Edwin shuddered, reminded of the casual force with which the fog-masked man had shoved him into the maze. He thought, uneasily, of Robin, who was just as vulnerable to magic as he’d ever been.
For lack of anything else to do, they took the office apart. Again.
They turned up no knives whatsoever, though did unearth a dusty penny coin tucked between wainscoting and floorboards. Miss Morrissey balanced it dubiously on her palm before handing it to Edwin, who slipped it into the pocket of his waistcoat just in case. He remembered Mrs. Sutton saying, He left with it in his pocket.
“It’s very well disguised, if that’s it,” said Miss Morrissey.
There were also plenty of cups, though they were porcelain and painted with primroses, and Miss Morrissey swore all five of them had been untidily stacked in the cupboard from the day she started work there two years ago. Edwin inspected them anyway, then handed them back and watched her restack them. The bright silver ring on her index finger was not quite regular, he noticed when she took the last cup from him. There was a triangular notch in it, deep and neat enough to be due to design rather than misadventure.
Edwin had seen that ring before.
He picked up her hand to look at it and only realised the rudeness of this when she sucked in her breath. He dropped it at once.
“My apologies,” he said. “That ring of yours. Where is it from?”
“My ring?” She tugged it off. “It’s not a token from a sweetheart, or anything like that. It was a birthday gift last month, from”—her hand fumbled, holding it out—“Reggie. Only a few weeks late, but you know how he was with remembering dates. Half the time it was a miracle that he had the briefing ready on Wednesdays.” A tremble of excitement entered her voice as Edwin took the ring from her. “Do you think it’s important? It’s not—any of those three things.”
Reggie was bad with dates, and with keeping time in general. And just like that Edwin, rubbing with his finger at the ring’s notch, remembered where he’d seen its twin. Hanging on the inner wall of the Gatlings’ oak-heart clock, which had started going wrong a month ago, as if the oak-heart was running low.
Or if something had disrupted the delicate balance of its magical mechanism.
Edwin’s pulse knocked at the groove of his throat. Cup, coin, knife—that was just a story for children, after all, and this was a coincidence too strong to ignore. Reggie Gatling, who had stumbled upon a secret that people would kill for, and who had been one step ahead of those people right up until the moment he wasn’t, had passed on two silver rings. One of them hidden away in his family’s house; the other hidden in plain sight, right here at the office, exactly where the contract’s seekers expected to find it.
Not much could pass a secret-bind. A jumbled clue to location might have been all an interrogator could wrangle before—well. Before. Edwin’s skin crawled and he set the ring on the desk, then proceeded to cast every detection-spell that he could think of before his magic whimpered down to the dregs. Nothing. Magically, the ring seemed inert.
An object of power has a weight to it. Edwin thought of Mrs. Sutton’s fern-fossil and wanted to growl in frustration at his own ignorance. All he wanted was to know things, when and how he needed to know them. Right now he was failing at that.