“Show me this secret study,” said Walt.
Edwin had left the rose pendant in a shadow box hanging on the parlour wall between two enormous floral embroidery samplers. The box was in the shape of a tree, with the trunk a series of stacked small windows. Edwin pulled the rose from the lowest of these, touched it to the mirror’s frame, and watched the glass dissolve.
The Rose Study was exceedingly cramped for three grown men, especially when one of them had shoulders like Robin’s. Walt called up a light and tethered it to the empty glass bowl on the desk, an old-fashioned style of guidekeeper. In the glow of it, mingling mellowly with the spill of daylight in from the parlour, Edwin looked around at the neatly shelved books and the polished floorboards, which suddenly seemed vulnerable; ready to be torn up. He remembered the destructive mess that he’d walked into in Reggie’s office—Robin’s office—the day after Robin was cursed. Walt would be methodical, but no less destructive.
“Where do we start?” Robin asked. “You did say you can’t do a spell to search for it, didn’t you?” Perhaps he was thinking about the wrecked office as well. It really was a shame that the objects were muffled against detection, because inability to define parameters— “Hold on,” said Edwin. He dragged pieces of thoughts around like a Latin sentence, until all the parts made tentative sense. “We don’t have to search for the contract in particular, or anything magical at all. We’re in a small space and we’re searching for silver.”
“Fossicking,” said Walter.
“Yes,” said Edwin. He sat at the desk and located in a drawer some pencils and a pile of writing paper. A floral scent wafted into the air as he lifted the paper onto the desk. Attar of roses. Flora Sutton had sat at this desk and written a letter to her great-nephew after he’d left her estate with two rings in his pocket. After she’d trusted to family and a secret-bind to keep the contract safe, when she knew danger would be closing in on her soon. She’d trusted in the wrong things.
Edwin wrote down a line of notation, tapped the pencil against his chin, put it down to move his fingers and remind himself how the blazes one defined silver in a cradle, and wrote another line.
“Fossicking?” Robin asked.
“If you can define something, you can find it,” Edwin said. “There’s a story about a magician who took himself to California, convinced he’d be able to make his fortune using it to find gold. It does work, but only if you’re very close already, and only if the amount of gold is large enough.”
“Did he make his fortune?”
“Killed in a fight over land boundaries. Or fell down a pit. Or did in fact strike it rich, and then changed his name and married an heiress in Boston. It’s a rather apocryphal story.” Edwin frowned at his work.
“We’re not here to be lectured,” said Walt.
Edwin defined the diameter of the fossicking spell to just beyond the walls of the study—they could always expand it to search the whole house later, if they felt like spending hours checking the teaspoons and candlesticks—and pushed the completed spell across the desk to Walt, who skimmed it and gave another nod, then pulled Edwin’s cradling string from a pocket of his waistcoat and tossed it across the desk.
“Go on,” said Walt. He still intended to keep his hands free and his own power untouched.
Building the spell here in the heart of Sutton was easy, easy. It was that extra inch of space, that friendliness to the air, the sense of molecules bending themselves to comply. The spell was one of those that was more palpable than visible, a cool throb between Edwin’s palms like water lifted from a lake and made spherical enough to dash in someone’s face—another favourite trick of magical children during careless summers.
Tossed wide, the spell splashed through him, then tossed itself back in pinprick form.
“Anything?” said Walt.
“Something.” Edwin stood and followed the pinpricks, which became sharper and sharper without ever registering as pain. By the pricking of my thumbs, he thought, and narrowly avoided laughing.
His thumbs tugged him first to the silver pen-stand on the desk and then to one of the drawers, where he unearthed a handsome letter opener that looked part of a set with the stand. He turned a slow circle in the centre of the room. Robin politely crammed himself beside the desk to give him space. There was only one more signal, one insistent tug, and it came from the bookshelf, where there was nothing visibly metallic at all.