But now he can feel the buzz of the phone against his chest and Baast is staring at his pocket with a disgruntled expression. He fumbles it out of his pocket and answers without pausing to look at the screen.
“Yes?” He hopes she can’t hear the foolish gallop of his pulse.
“Arthur Starling?”
There is a pause while Arthur’s heart sinks and he berates it for rising in the first place. “Who is this?”
“My name is Elizabeth Baine. I’m with the Innovative Solutions Consulting Group, calling on behalf of Gravely Power. We’ve been trying to contact you for some time.”
Arthur supposes he should have expected this. They no longer have a spy, so they must resort to less-elegant strategies—bribery, blackmail, various unlikely legal threats designed to frighten people into compliance. But you can only be frightened if you have a future to lose, and Arthur doesn’t.
The morning after Jasper’s visit, Arthur called Eleanor’s publisher. The first person told him chirpily that she didn’t know who to ask about the source of a nineteenth-century dedication, but she’d get back to him! （She did not get back to him.） The next person asked him if he knew there was a recession on and that everyone was stressed and overworked and did not have time to pursue the eccentric requests of a dead author’s not-quite-descendant. The next person hung up on him.
But Arthur persisted, and eventually he spoke to the great-nephew of Eleanor’s first editor, who consulted the family archives and confirmed that the dedication was added in the seventh edition, in accordance with the will Eleanor Starling wrote just before she disappeared.
Arthur had thanked him and hung up knowing that Opal was right, and that Eleanor had left instructions for finding Underland.
Since then he’s been readying himself, waiting only for the mist to rise.
“So, Mr. Starling—”
“Fuck off.”
He’s pulling the screen away from his ear when the voice sighs and says, tinnily, “That’s the second time today I’ve been told to fuck off.”
The tendons go taut across the back of Arthur’s hand as he presses the phone back to his ear. “You’ve spoken to Opal.”
“Who do you think gave us this number?” Of course she did. Arthur doesn’t blame her; he deserves worse. “We expected a little more from her, if I’m honest. But she proved uncooperative.”
“What does that mean?” Somewhere inside Arthur there is a leash, badly frayed. He hears invisible threads snapping. “What did you do to her?”
“We didn’t do anything to her.” It’s her mild amusement that does it: the leash breaks.
His voice emerges as a glottal rasp, fury-choked. “If you’re lying, if you’ve hurt her, I swear I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” She asks it quickly, almost greedily, as if she knows precisely what violent delights he is imagining. The cellar door, thrown open. The Beasts running loose, clotting her arteries or crashing her car, raining a thousand calamities on her miserable soul—
Arthur swallows savage bile and does not answer, fumbling for the ragged remains of that leash.
“Did you think we took a bat to her kneecaps? We’re corporate consultants, not mob bosses.” Elizabeth Baine laughs, artfully. It’s supposed to make Arthur feel a little chagrined, quietly reassured.
Arthur is neither. “You drugged Miss Opal without her consent or knowledge.” He remembers the way she looked—sick and reeling, unwillingly vulnerable, like a knight stripped of her armor; he wonders where Baine is now and how quickly he could get there. “Then you questioned her, you must have threatened her—”
“We found the right incentive for her cooperation, that’s all. Or I thought we did.” There’s a shrug in her voice. “Apparently I was mistaken.”
Had Opal refused them, in the end? His heart lifts, and he tries hard to stamp it back down. “That’s too bad.”
“It is. So, we were going to approach you directly. Starling House isn’t the only place we’re investigating, I hope you know. It’s one of several unique sites—we’re calling them anomalous apertures, in the reports—but it seems to be the most active. I was going to offer you a fairly absurd amount of money for your property. I imagine you would have refused—”
“Yes.”
“—forcing us to work with Mr. Gravely to pursue the mineral rights to your land which, as I suspect you already know, do not belong to you.”