“Alston?” said Robin. “Lord Hawthorn?”
“You’ve had the pleasure?” Trudie tinkled a laugh. “I suppose he’s more likely to be in your circles than ours. Won’t have a thing to do with magical society since he got back from the war. You’ll have to tell us what he’s like these days, Sir Robin. The worst kind of dissolute, I hear.”
“I’ve spoken to the man for less than ten minutes altogether,” said Robin. “I certainly didn’t know he had a twin.”
“Lady Elsie.” Bel shook her head. “Such a tragedy, what happened to that poor girl.” Everything about her begged to be asked the next question. Trudie’s brown eyes glittered in anticipation of chewing over someone else’s misfortune.
For the first time, Robin looked something less than perfectly at ease. Edwin wondered if the man was going to flatly refuse the hook, but he said, “Oh?”
“Perhaps it was always going to end badly,” said Bel. “Lord Hawthorn was strong, but Lady Elsie was enormously powerful—more magic than had been seen in hundreds of years, they said.”
“A shame,” said Charlie. “Females simply can’t be trained to that extent. Of course it unbalanced her.”
“She burned all the power out of her own brother,” said Bel, “when they were trying some kind of twisted experiment. Hawthorn wasn’t well enough to leave the house for months afterwards, and as for Lady Elsie . . .” Belinda lowered her voice. “Nobody ever saw her in company again. Poor thing, she only lasted another year. Leapt from the roof of their manor house. It was awful.”
Edwin had a memory, sudden and wild as a summer rainstorm, of Elsie Alston, with her tangle of brown hair and her infectious laugh. A laugh that she and her brother would bounce between them like an amplification clause built into a cradling. Edwin had been a small child when the Alstons were the darlings of English magical society, and only thirteen when Elsie died. He remembered chasing the twins across the Cheetham fields, unable to keep up. He remembered the tall, magnificent young woman who’d been a fixture in their lives one day—not seeming unbalanced in the slightest—and vanished into sickness and seclusion and scandal the next.
Edwin’s mother, who still exchanged letters with the Countess Cheetham, said nothing. A fresh bread roll sat entirely untouched on her plate.
“It does sound like a tragic business,” said Robin. He fixed Edwin with a look that said, clear as glass, Help me change the damn subject. “Edwin told me that you’re born with magic or without it. What happens to the people born with great big buckets of power who never get trained? Surely it must pop up from time to time among families where there are no other magicians?”
Miggsy groaned. “Must we have all the great debates over dinner?”
“Sir Robin’s allowed to be curious,” said Charlie.
“I’ve tripped over another of those central questions,” said Robin, quirking a smile at Edwin. “Haven’t I?”
Edwin said, “You’re more or less right. We have to assume that a small number of natural magicians are born outside of registered families, but are never trained, and so never know.”
“Think of someone born with a great musical gift and never put in front of a piano,” said Charlie. “But one can hardly go around testing the general population just in case you unearth the occasional natural case of magic, can one? There’d be no way to keep ourselves hush-hush.”
“Very occasionally there’s an accident that’s probably some child’s magic going wrong,” said Billy. “And then the Assembly has to send people around to fix it up and smooth things over. It’s one of the things that your office is supposed to pick up on.”
Over the course of several seconds, Robin transparently remembered the existence of his civil service position. Edwin resisted the urge to laugh.
It was true, though: hush-hush was the rule of it. There were hundreds of years of near-disasters to prove that. Edwin had read reports from the liaison office’s records, including one of a mass unbusheling in Manchester in the 1850s that had nearly started an urban war and had resulted in two cotton mills and a meeting hall burning down, an extremely difficult cover-up, and a good third of the city’s magicians packing up and leaving.
“Tell me if this is a silly question,” said Robin, “but I hadn’t even thought—I mean, Edwin’s told me about your Assembly, but—is there magical work, officially? Positions of employment?”