Robin glanced sideways. The shell had certainly hardened again. Courcey’s face was set and pale and unflinching, framed between collar and hat. When Robin overlaid that image with the one of Courcey sprawled bare and panting on a bed . . . it was preposterous. The man was like a porcelain figurine. There was the sense that if you tried to remove his clothes you’d find them painted on.
Robin shifted his jaw, uncomfortably aware of his own clothes. It had been—some time, that was all, since he’d been sexually intimate with another person. And he’d been accosted quite against his will by lurid visions of this one.
“I knew he’d be like that,” Courcey muttered.
“Thank you,” Robin said.
Another of those wary looks, bracing for mockery. “For what?”
“For trying anyway, I suppose. It can’t have been pleasant.”
“No worse than a handful of splinters when you’re spinning an orchard from twigs.”
“What does that mean?”
Courcey coloured. “Nothing. It’s a saying. A kind of proverb.”
“A magical proverb? Like the—marvellous light thing? Miss Morrissey told me, when she was explaining about unbusheling,” Robin added when Courcey looked startled.
“We are man’s marvellous light We hold the gifts of the dawn From those now passed and gone / And carry them into the night.” Courcey spoke coolly enough that it took a moment for the rhythm to emerge. “It’s a verse from an old poem by a magician called Alfred Dufay. There’s a spell-game set to it, that children learn. The other one is just—something you say.” He sighed. “The poem’s very long, and not very good. I can show you the whole thing. We’ve a book of Dufay’s work in the family library at Penhallick.”
“Thank . . . you?”
Courcey’s mouth twisted. “We’ve one of the largest private collections in the country, including a handful of books that contain information on rune-curses. I’ll go there this weekend, to try to find out more.” After a moment he added, any reluctance smoothed so far into neutrality that Robin couldn’t hear it: “And you should probably come along. I don’t want to rely on a drawing of the curse, especially if it’s changing, and I might need to do a few tests.”
Robin swallowed both an unmanly squawk of Tests? and the instinctive groan of someone to whom research had always felt like pushing a lump of marble uphill. “All right. Books are at least somewhat less likely to hurl insults at one,” he said.
“It is one of their major appeals,” said Courcey, and Robin found himself unexpectedly smiling.
The station platforms were crowded on that Friday afternoon. It was the third weekend of autumn; the Season was over, the weather promised to be crisp but still eke out occasional scraps of sunshine, and half of London was fleeing to the country for either prolonged shooting jaunts or Saturday-to-Monday house parties. Edwin saw a cluster of young women laughing and waving from atop piles of luggage as a train pulled out, the moving air sending their hat-ribbons fluttering.
Blyth had acquired them first-class tickets from the office account, at Miss Morrissey’s insistence. They were heading to Penhallick to investigate an intrusion of the magical world onto the unmagical, she’d pointed out, with a meaningful glance at Blyth’s arm. That fell within the bounds of their job descriptions.
For the first stretch of the journey north they shared a compartment with a dignified couple who spoke in the shorthand murmurs of the long-married. Blyth read the Times; Edwin worked his way through two chapters of Kinoshita, not bothering to waste energy on disguising the cover. For the most part, people didn’t see the unfamiliar unless it threw itself in their face.
Or emblazoned itself on their arm, he supposed, looking up from a deeply confusing paragraph about using fish to navigate by sea. The train was pulling in to Harlow and the couple were gathering their luggage. Blyth ducked to avoid a blow from a hatbox, folded his paper, and met Edwin’s eyes as the compartment door closed, leaving them alone.
“Come on, then,” Blyth said. “Tell me about this estate we’re headed to.”
Kinoshita nipped Edwin’s finger as he reluctantly closed it. “There isn’t a lot to tell. I can’t claim it’s been in the family for generations. My parents bought Penhallick just after my sister was born, and to hear them talk it was ramshackle at best. I think they liked having something they could splash their own tastes over.” Edwin brushed a fingertip up and down the book’s edge. “It’s a large house, but there’s plenty of room to keep to yourself. If that’s what you want.”