Courcey installed himself in the chair across the desk from Robin, opened his folder to a blank piece of paper, pulled a pen from a pocket of his waistcoat, and laid them both on the desk with the air of someone not prepared to have his time wasted.
“As she said, I’m the liaison for the Minister, which means—”
“Which Minister?”
“Hah,” said Courcey sourly, as though Robin had made an unfunny joke instead of a desperate enquiry.
“No, I mean it,” said Robin. “You’re going to give me a straight answer. I can’t sit here all day pretending I know what the blazes I’m meant to be doing, because I don’t. It took me an hour to find this place this morning, and that was mostly by knocking on doors. Assistant in the Office of Special Domestic Affairs and Complaints. And this is it! The entire office! I don’t know which department or commission it falls under! I don’t even know who I report to!”
Courcey raised his eyebrows. “You report directly to Asquith.”
“I—what?”
There was no way that could be right. This nothing position, so lowly that nobody had heard of it—and yet, muttered part of Robin’s brain, he had his own typist, instead of access to a room of them—had been given to Robin because his parents had managed to make an enemy of the wrong person, and Robin was wearing the consequences. Healsmith wouldn’t have looked so smug if he was handing Robin a job that reported directly to the Prime Minister.
Courcey’s mouth looked lemon-ish now. “You really don’t even know what the job is.”
Robin shrugged uncomfortably.
“Special affairs. Special liaison.” Courcey did something with his hands, moving his fingers together and apart. “Special. You know.”
“Are you some kind of . . . spy?” Robin hazarded.
Courcey opened his mouth. Closed his mouth. Opened it again. “Miss Morrissey!”
The door opened. “Mr. Courcey, you—”
“What,” said Robin, “is your pen doing?”
There was a long pause. The office door closed again. Robin didn’t look up to confirm that Miss Morrissey had prudently kept herself on the other side of it. He was too busy gazing at Courcey’s pen, which was standing on one end. No—it was moving, with its nib making swift loops against the uppermost sheet of paper. The date had been written in the top-right corner: Monday 14th September, 1908. The ink—blue—was still drying. As Robin watched, the pen slunk back to the left margin of the paper and hovered there like a footman who was hoping nobody had seen him almost drop the saltcellar.
Courcey said, “It’s a simple enough . . .” and then stopped. Perhaps because he had realised he was applying the word simple to something that was anything but.
Perhaps not.
Robin’s mind was oddly blank, as it had been sometimes at the end of a particularly fiendish examination, as if he’d scooped out its worthwhile contents with his fingers and smeared them grimly onto the page. The last time he’d felt this way was when he found out that his parents were dead. Instead of surprise, this. An exhausted, wrung-out space.
Robin waved his hand between the pen and the ceiling. Nothing. No wires. He didn’t even know how wires would have worked to create such a thing. But the action seemed necessary, a last gasp of practicality before acceptance flooded in.
He said, with what he could already tell was going to be a pathetic attempt at levity: “So when you said special . . .”
Courcey was now regarding Robin as though Robin were an unusual species of animal, encountered in the wild and possessing a large mouth full of larger teeth. He looked, in short, as though he were bracing himself to engage in a wrestling match, and was wondering why Robin hadn’t pounced yet.
They stared at each other. The room’s weak light caught on the pale tips of Courcey’s lashes. He was not a handsome man, but Robin had never been inspected this closely by other men except as a prelude to fucking, and the sheer intimate intensity of it was sending confusing signals through Robin’s body.
“You know,” said Robin, “I’m beginning to suspect there’s been a mistake.”
“How astute of you,” said Courcey, still with that lion-tamer tension.
“I might be lacking one or two vital qualifications for this position.”
“Indeed.”
“I suppose your pal Gatling could conjure pigeons from his desk drawers with a snap of his fingers too.”
“No,” said Courcey, the syllable drawn out like toffee. “This position’s still part of the Home Office, it’s not a magician’s job. I’m the liaison to the Chief Minister of the Magical Assembly.”