Edwin became aware that his own fingers were clenched around his cradling string in his pocket. A useless and belated reflex. “Are you sure it’s—finished? Gone?”
“Yes. Distract me. What were you saying, before it hit?”
It took Edwin a long second to scramble after the memory. His heart was pounding in his throat. He returned to his own side of the compartment.
“Family,” he said. “Not your—I mean, you’re the eldest? Inheriting the seat. The title.”
“It’s only me and my sister. Maud.” The lines of pain were fading from Blyth’s face. “You’re doing me a favour, inviting me away for the weekend. I’m escaping at least three awkward conversations. Maudie’s furious; I think she had her heart set on a roof-raising row. She likes having a head of the family she can actually argue with. ‘Head of the family.’” Blyth echoed himself. “Honestly, it’s an awful thought. I’m useless at it. Wish the last Sir Robert had had the sense to produce a couple more sons before he got around to me.” He shook his head, a smile starting to hover at the edges of his mouth. “Sorry. I must stop doing this. Blathering on like some terrible doom’s befallen me when there are chaps who’d cheerfully give their arm for a title.”
A bubble of memory took the opportunity to burst in Edwin’s mind. “Sir Robert Blyth,” he said. “And Lady Blyth. I do know the names. I’ve heard them talked about.”
“That would have pleased them.” Blyth seemed a straightforward sort, but it was hard not to scent his ambivalence.
“Philanthropy? Charity works?”
“Yes.”
The ambivalence was practically a miasma in the carriage now. Edwin didn’t press further, and Blyth’s shoulders dropped by an inch. Renowned parents and complicated feelings. Edwin could have some sympathy for that.
“You should start calling me Edwin,” he said before he could lose the nerve.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re informal, at Penhallick. And you’ll be swimming in Courceys.”
“Is that what your family calls you? Just Edwin?”
Walt had called him Eddie for nearly a year, when Edwin was nine and Walt thirteen, simply because Edwin hated it so much. Their mother had begged their father to put a stop to it, after Edwin had wept ragingly into her skirts, and Walt had waited two weeks before retaliating. Carefully, where the bruises wouldn’t show. And the burns on Edwin’s hands had been Edwin’s own fault, Walt pointed out; nobody had forced him to scramble among the embers for what remained of the notebook where he’d recorded a year’s worth of fledgling experiments with new spells, and which he’d thought he’d hidden carefully enough.
No, he’d paid the price to bury Eddie. There was nothing he could do about Win except lie to delay the inevitable.
“Yes. Edwin. Why, what do your family call you?”
“Perils of being named for my father. Robin.” Blyth’s smile made him look barely out of school. “You should do the same, if we’re to be friendly.”
“We are not,” Edwin began, but made himself stop. “Robin. All right.”
Edwin settled himself back against the leather of the seat. It was real. The rattle of the window in its frame was real. Robert Blyth was not exactly imaginary—no, he was too solid, too broad-shouldered, his voice too loud and too warm: the voice of someone who’d never had cause to make himself smaller. But the urge Edwin had to creep closer to that warmth, to imagine that it might be for him, somehow . . . that was illusion. Robert, Robin, was exactly the kind of person that Edwin had learned to dislike, and who had never needed instruction to dislike him right back. If he sometimes seemed to care for what Edwin thought, that was illusion too. There were exactly two people in the world who gave the smallest damn for Edwin’s opinion, and Len Geiger was only one of them because he might have gone out of business without the large chunk of Edwin’s allowance that ended up in his till every month.
No. It was just that Edwin was the only magician Robin Blyth had met so far who wasn’t actively wishing him harm.
Jack—Hawthorn—didn’t count. Indeed, his lordship was determined not to be counted. Not that it had stopped him from reinforcing the point: Edwin was an annoyance at best, something to be brushed off one’s coat and ejected from one’s house. Edwin didn’t care for this warm-voiced near-stranger’s opinion either; he didn’t, but surely he was allowed to hate that Hawthorn had made Edwin’s inferiority so clear right in front of the man’s face.