Blyth unbuttoned one of his cuffs and pushed it up his arm. He proceeded to tell them a story that Edwin had to interrupt several times, including a forced pause where he scrambled for a piece of blank paper and set his pen to taking notes. Fog masks: that would be a simple illusion spell. Something that Reggie had hidden. And glowing shapes that became a tattoo. Blyth’s voice halted when he talked about that.
Edwin frowned and made Blyth repeat the words that had been exchanged between himself and his attackers. “Are you sure that they didn’t say anything else about where Reggie might be now?”
“No, I’m not sure,” said Blyth, looking at Edwin with dislike.
“Well, then—”
“I was distracted, due to being knocked out and tortured and tugged around on a piece of string.”
A small index card flicked out of the stacks of Edwin’s mind. There was a spell by the unfortunately fanciful name of the Goblin’s Bridle, which could be used to calm frightened horses and make them biddable. The idea of it being used on a person made him feel ill.
“It hurt. And then when you looked, later, it was on your arm? Anything else you can remember? How the cradling—oh, this is useless, as if you could tell.”
Another held gaze from Blyth, longer this time. That stubbornness had redoubled. “No. Nothing else.”
“I’m so sorry, Sir Robert,” said Miss Morrissey. “It does sound like you had an awful night.”
“Thank you.” The dislike melted away and Blyth smiled at her. “Didn’t you say something about Gatling behaving oddly, before he vanished?”
“Yes. Ever since he got back from that trip to the North York Moors.” She frowned. “It was some tiny mining town where the inhabitants were reporting ghosts walking through the streets.”
“Ghosts?” Blyth’s eyebrows shot up.
“He did say it’d all been a misunderstanding when he got back,” said Miss Morrissey. “Nothing magical involved. But he was vague about it. That was when he started acting all mysterious.”
“It was a fool’s errand in the first place,” snapped Edwin. “Visible ghosts? Nonsense. There’s no such thing.” But half of his annoyance was with himself. Nonsense or not, if he’d accepted the invitation to go along—if he’d even acted interested instead of telling Reggie not to waste his time—would Reggie have liked him more, trusted him more? Enough to confide in Edwin about this dangerous mess he’d become mixed up in?
“Well,” said Blyth firmly. “I’m as keen as anyone to find Gatling, because I’d like to shake five kinds of hell out of him. He told them this thing was in the office. He’s the one who sent them here. This is his fault.” An irritated wave of his arm.
Edwin reached for Blyth’s wrist, meaning to get a closer look; Blyth jerked it away, then firmed his lips, as if angry with himself for what had clearly been an instinctive reaction. He untucked his legs from their crossed position on the desk, letting them dangle like a barrier between the two of them, and shoved his arm defiantly forward. Blyth’s forearm was corded with muscle and dotted with freckles and moles. His skin was warm.
Edwin looked over the symbols of what Blyth had called the tattoo, and which began at the wrist and stopped an inch from the crook of Blyth’s elbow. They weren’t any alphabet that Edwin was familiar with, but the arrangement of them—each symbol linked to the next by a dark tendril, creating a sort of cyclical sentence—made his stomach sink. He only realised when Blyth’s fingers curled like dry leaves in a fire that he was tracing the symbols with his fingertip.
“It’s a rune-curse of some kind,” he said, releasing Blyth. “That’s all I can tell without further research.”
“A curse.” Blyth took a deep breath. “The bounder did say he was giving me something to mull over. Seemed to think it’d make me more pliable.” Fear flickered in his face. “Could it? Do that to me? Like—laudanum dropped into my drink?”
“Miss Morrissey?” inquired Edwin. “Can you make anything of it?”
She peered at the curse in turn, coming close enough that Edwin could smell the floral-chemical scent of her hair, pinned up in its usual nest of luxuriant black. “Alas,” she said. “I haven’t a clue. And I’m hardly the best person you could be asking.”
No. A continuance of the sinking sensation in Edwin’s stomach signaled exactly whom he should be asking, and the very idea made him want to take a train to Dover and fling himself over the cliffs.