“I lost track of time at breakfast. I was reading,” said Edwin.
Adelaide mimed genteel shock. Robin grinned. “The diaries again? Any leads on the cup and the knife?”
“It’d be going a lot faster if she hadn’t insisted on using code names for everything, as though she were some sort of intelligence agent engaged in high-level treason,” said Edwin ruefully. “Even in her private diaries. Not that I’m surprised.”
Edwin was learning that Flora Sutton had been as busy and brilliant as she was untrusting and suspicious. In the previous century, when women were even less likely to be taught anything in the way of systematic magic, she and three of her friends had formed a kind of ladies’ club and simply . . . done it themselves. They’d looked into the land as a source of magic, and thus into the story of the Last Contract, and spent years tracking the items to a medieval church in a small town in Yorkshire. And then years more trying to erase that fact, because they’d realised what could be done with the contract by those without scruples.
“Speaking of magical items.” Robin pulled a shilling from his pocket and held it out. “My very own pass token for the Barrel.”
“You had another meeting? How did this one go?”
Robin shrugged. “I gave them enough excruciating details about that vision of a horse race that I nearly bored myself to death. That chap Knox they’ve roped in as my handler looked rather glad to see the back of me, by the end of it.” Robin’s visions had become much less frequent since he’d begun to learn the trick of allowing them in at will. He still only had the barest amount of control over what he would see. They were working on it, as on so many things.
“I saw that blond woman again,” Robin added. “I’m thinking of giving her a name, for reference—how do we feel about Harriet? She was on a ship. One of those big ocean liners. Just as Lord Hawthorn was, the first time I saw him.”
Edwin had been on a ferry exactly once in his life and had felt the shade of green he’d turned. “I’m not convinced that any boats are in my future,” he said. “And I’d prefer if Hawthorn wasn’t either.”
Robin smiled. “I’ll tell you at once if I ever see myself punching him, how’s that?”
“Could you pretend you did see that, and describe it for me in excruciating detail?”
“Could you instead set the violent fantasies aside until morning tea?” said Adelaide. “And ditto for any imminent lectures on liminality, thank you, Edwin. They’re easier to digest when delivered with biscuits.”
Liminal spaces were the basis of Flora Sutton’s system of magical practice, and Edwin was still teasing out the extent to which she and her friends had learned it in pieces or developed it themselves. Life and death. Night and day—oh, that too had been in that silly poem all along. The gifts of the dawn. Seasons and solstices. It was all highly agricultural. Edwin was having to develop a keen interest in gardening to follow along with her notes.
And Edwin had thought, at one time, that there was nobody in England doing truly original work.
Two days ago, Edwin had sat in the rose garden at Sutton Cottage and called up an echo-illusion of Flora Sutton carefully cutting a bloom with scissors. It wasn’t her true spirit; only a memory imprinted on the air. She couldn’t hear Edwin, when he pledged himself to avenge her and Reggie the only way he knew how: to continue her work with the old magics, and to find her contemporaries and warn them. To do his best to ensure that nobody would use the contract as she’d feared it might be used.
He could only hope that her land, which was now Edwin’s land, and in whose thriving green lawn he’d buried his fingers as the image of the woman faded, had both heard and felt the strength of his intent. Mrs. Sutton had lived her last hour with the guilt of sending Reggie to his death. That guilt, along with the burgeoning kinship she’d felt with Edwin’s magic, was what had been enough at the moment of her death to tip Sutton over into accepting Edwin as her heir, and thereby save his life. Edwin was sure of this without being able to say why. He could only assume it had been written on the blank spaces of him, somehow, in the incoherent moment when he banished Walt; when he was the Sutton lands, and the house.
It wasn’t up to Edwin to decide if he was worthy. He had been chosen, and he would fight to live up to it. Chosen twice over, in fact; his heart lightened again as he met Robin’s affectionate smile.
“I did have something to show you,” he said, trying for offhand.