“No, I know,” said Maud. “I’d far rather be known as the most selfish girl in London than have society start expecting us to behave like them.”
Robin beckoned her closer and dropped a kiss in her hair, grateful for how quickly she’d come on board. “You’re not that selfish, Maudie.”
“I could break another vase in the new place, to christen it. Like Champagne.”
“That’s for ships.”
Maud giggled and retrieved her tea, and the conversation moved on to where in London they should start the hunt for a smaller house.
After lunch Maud left for a nebulous social event with her friend Lizzie Sinclair. The chaperonage of Lizzie’s thoroughly bluestockinged mother meant that the event was likely to be a suffragette meeting or something of that nature, but Robin knew that any expression of concern on his behalf would only push Maud to further heights. Instead of coming home talking excitedly about the rights of women and workers, she’d end up chaining herself to something.
Robin had another meeting. This one was with Martin Gunning; the man of business looked unflatteringly surprised that Robin had sought him out, instead of once again postponing. Hiding. Robin made himself pay attention to the numbers, floated the house-selling idea and was rewarded with a slow nod from Gunning, and emerged from the meeting feeling flattened. His head was aching again. Probably there was an imbued tea that would be able to fix that.
A smile dragged at the corners of Robin’s mouth as he remembered Edwin sipping tea and expressing his surprise that Robin hadn’t hit him across the face and stormed back to London. Always, with Edwin, that surprise. The wariness. The vivid expectation of abandonment; the bone-deep resignation to the fact that he would lose the things he wanted, or else never deserved them in the first place.
“Oh, bloody sodding hell,” Robin muttered, and went to find his coat.
Maud was right. He didn’t want to give it all up. He wanted to be fascinated. Perhaps he and Edwin Courcey could never be anything more than uneasy curios to each other, but Edwin was still the member of the magical world that Robin trusted the most, and in the space of two weeks Robin had tumbled into something that he wasn’t prepared to give up without a fight. And he was good at fighting.
He’d drag an apology out of Edwin and then . . . then he’d insist that they start over. Try again. No more lies.
He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. If he hurried, he’d be able to make it to the Home Office; Miss Morrissey was his only lead. She knew everything. He’d have laid down a month’s income that she knew Edwin’s address. Robin informed a footman that he was going out, donned coat and gloves, adjusted the angle of his hat like a medieval knight perfecting the tilt of his visor before a chivalric quest, and walked out the front door.
Adelaide Morrissey was down on the street, gathering her skirts to climb the steps of the townhouse.
They stared at each other for a few stultifying seconds, during which Miss Morrissey collected a faint spray of gutter-water from a passing carriage and two double-glances at the colour of her skin. Then Robin managed to say, “Er, won’t you . . . come in?”
The third of Robin’s Friday meetings was, at least, far from boring. Miss Morrissey strode her way into the house, brandished Robin’s resignation letter in his face right there in the entrance hall, and emitted a worried-sounding spiel about the fact that Edwin had taken her ring and gone off to find out if it was actually part of the Last Contract by looking for another ring, and he’d promised to come back and tell her as soon as he discovered anything and now it was a full day later—
“And I’ve been glued to the desk all day in case he turned up, but it’s not as if anything more important could be keeping him, and I’m—” She took a deep breath, and her mouth crinkled with concern. “He wouldn’t let me go with him because it was too dangerous, as if he knew the first thing about dealing with danger, and I don’t know where the Gatlings live—I’ve never met them—and now I’m worried he’s going to end up dead and dragged from the river, just like Reggie.” She said something else, a fluid muttering in a foreign language that had the clear intonation of being unladylike.
Fear soaked Robin like rain. A vision struggled up from the cracks of memory, one of those from the brief lucid period when he’d tried to direct the foresight: Edwin, lying pale and lifeless on the ground, surrounded by people—
No. No.
“How can we find him?”