Myriad questions hung thick in Edwin’s mind, and he was dizzy with urgency at the promise of finally having them answered. He snatched at the first that came to hand. “How did Reggie know you had it in the first place? All of this, the threats, the curse—it must be because the contract can’t be found with any kind of spell.” He thought of the tantrum of spilled paper and overturned furniture in the office.
Mrs. Sutton hesitated a moment more. Edwin struggled to trap the rest of his questions behind his teeth, his breath held, waiting.
Then a spark entered the old woman’s eyes, and she seemed to come to a decision. “That rather depends on the spell. You. Courcey.” She nodded to Edwin. “Go to that cabinet and fetch me the stone in the uppermost drawer.”
Edwin did as directed. The room was lined with bookshelves. One didn’t notice them at first beyond the sheer, colourful, nose-itching extravagance of the flowers. The standing shelves alternated with panels of dark-stained wood carved in a pattern of ivy.
The stone in question, nestled in a velvet-lined drawer in a pretty wooden cabinet, was a flat and sharp-edged chunk of grey rock. Etched into its surface, most visible when angled into the light, was a branching fern.
“A fossil,” said Robin. He quirked a smile at Edwin’s surprise. “My parents liked the occasional antiquity along with their art. I think we’ve a nice stone seashell or three in one of the parlours.”
“This plant is long gone, but you can tell where it lay,” said Mrs. Sutton. Her manner was quicker now, more eager, as though she’d given in to an impulse to indulge herself by explaining a theory to a willing audience. “An object of power has a weight to it, and will warp the normal lines and channels of magic around itself. That’s what you look for, if you know how. Even if the thing’s removed, if it’s been there long enough”—a nod to the fossil in Edwin’s hand—“the shape of it remains.”
“Like one of those echo illusion spells?” said Robin. “An imprint of the past, turned into something you can see?”
That got him a sharp look from Flora Sutton. “This is how we found the contract in the first place. And the imprint is stronger if the object rests in a place of power. Like Sutton.” She glanced around the room, pride heavy in her gaze. “Two channels of magic cross one another here.”
“Channels of magic.” Edwin’s mind was spinning. He needed two hours and a notebook to make sense of all of this. He needed to fling himself onto the rug at this strange old woman’s feet and refuse to budge until he’d absorbed everything she had to teach. “You’re talking about ley lines. That’s—nobody bothers with ley lines anymore. That sort of magic hasn’t worked for generations.”
“Certainly it doesn’t work, when you men try to wrench it into your neat little boxes and cradles.” Flora Sutton sniffed. “Sutton’s power makes it a perfect place to enchant as a hiding place, but also makes a—heavier footprint. Easier to locate, once one knows the trick. It was always a risk.” She sighed. “Reggie said that the people he was working with hadn’t quite got the knack of it, but they were starting to triangulate the pieces. And Reggie saw their maps and figured it out, because he knew I lived here. And so he came.” She spread her hands. “To warn me.”
“And you gave him the contract to take away with him,” said Robin. “Left with it in his pocket, you said.”
“He took the danger away with him too,” said Edwin. “That was noble.”
“Was it?” said Robin. He was watching Mrs. Sutton, as he had when he’d accused her of being a liar. “I have to assume there’s some reason everyone’s after this thing, and prepared to do violence for it. And you’ve told us a great deal for someone with little reason to trust us, but you haven’t told us why the contract’s so important.”
He was right.
The wrinkle-lined mouth tightened. “Ignorance of its purpose is the only reason to trust you at all. Safekeeping works until the moment it doesn’t, Sir Robert. Reggie told me he didn’t like the people he was working with; he’d stopped trusting their intentions, but he couldn’t stop them from coming here eventually. The best he could do was to stay a step ahead. We agreed he would move it to a new place, where it hadn’t rested so long, and so make it more difficult for them to find. And I refused to let him tell me where that would be.”