A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(8)
The rain had thickened. Edwin turned up the collar of his coat and dashed as far as Knightsbridge Station, then took the Underground to Leicester Square. He was in the mood to not talk with anyone and, as sometimes happened, felt perversely like surrounding himself with people to not-talk to. As the train rattled along he worried at Reggie’s absence some more, as though at a loose tooth. Having a counterpart as easy to deal with as Reggie had always been a stroke of good luck. Edwin didn’t deal well with most people.
And now he had to deal with Sir Robert Blyth, who had the speech and the manner of every healthy, vigorous, half-witted boy that Edwin had spent his school and university years trying to ignore. A perfect specimen of incurious English manhood, from the thick brown wave of his hair to the firm jaw. Not enough wit to be sceptical. Not enough sense to be afraid.
What on Earth had possessed Edwin to show Blyth one of his own creations?
Come now, Edwin told himself, merciless. You know the answer to that.
The answer was that Blyth, fresh to magic as an apple emerging from a spiral of peel, knew just enough nothing to be a temptation. He didn’t know to sneer at Edwin’s use of the string to guide his cradling, like a child learning hand positions. Before Edwin showed him the snowflake spell, Blyth hadn’t seen anything more impressive than a floating pen.
His face had lit up. Nobody had ever looked at any of Edwin’s spells like that.
Lovely, Blyth had said.
Edwin hadn’t considered the aesthetics of the thing before. It was an experiment in crystallisation technique that had taken Edwin half a year to develop. As far as he knew, he was the only magician in England who could do it. And he still couldn’t manage the cradles without the crutch of string.
Aboveground, Edwin made his way up Charing Cross Road to one of the smallest bookshops, which sat between two larger and grander ones like a boy squashed between his parents on a bench.
“How d’you do, Mr. Courcey?” said Len Geiger as the bell hung by the door gave a rattling peal.
Edwin pulled off his hat and returned the greeting, forcing himself to stop and ask after Geiger’s family even though his feet wanted to drag him straight past the register. The warmth of the shop and the damp of the rain gave the air a greenhouse feel, which vanished as Edwin moved between shelves to the back of the shop. Here the air was as it should be: dry, edged with dust and leather and paper.
The mirror hung on the wall in the shop’s back corner was as tall as a man and spattered with tarnish, dimly reflecting the shadows and spines of books. Edwin touched the mirror’s surface and the illusion winked out in response to what he was. Not much of a magician, but enough. He stepped through into the room beyond.
At first glance this looked like a smaller reflection of the room Edwin had just left. More books, on more shelves. It had the quiet of an unoccupied chapel or the stacks of a library. Edwin set briefcase, hat, and coat down near the mirror through which he had stepped, and exhaled. He came here as other men went to gaming-rooms or brothels, orchestral performances or opium dens. Everyone had their own vice of relaxation. Edwin’s was just considered duller than most.
He browsed for a pleasant half hour, touching the spines of books with a reverent finger, occasionally pulling one from the shelf to check its table of contents. He resisted the urge to shove Manning’s abysmal thesis on visual illusions back into the shadows of other, worthier books.
Midway through the shelf labelled NATURAL SCIENCES & MAGICS, Edwin spotted an indigo-blue cover with the title stamped in gold: Working with Life: Kinoshita’s Sympathies & Manipulations. His breath caught, and he let it out in a low whistle.
Geiger’s face creased around his smile when he saw the book in Edwin’s hand, and he pulled out brown paper and string to wrap it. “Knew you’d appreciate that one, sir,” he said. “Got it in a box of donations two days ago. Thought I’d leave you the pleasure of finding it your own self.”
Edwin next ducked into another bookshop, this one even shabbier in appearance. Here he made an offhand comment about the weather, which was answered with a solemn nod and the slide of a much slimmer book, this one already brown-papered, across the counter.
The Cavendish was serving lunch in the dining room by the time Edwin returned home. He ate and took his purchases up to his rooms, which had been cleaned, with a fire lit in the largest grate. Fresh-laundered clothes hung in the wardrobe and lay folded neatly in the dresser. Edwin could have afforded his own valet, and his rented suite included a modest servant’s quarters, but at university he’d fallen out of the habit of being so closely attended. What he’d fallen into instead was the habit of enclosed privacy and quiet, and he’d no intention of fishing himself out of it. The Cavendish was well staffed and accustomed to catering to the needs of bachelors.
He cracked the window of his sitting room. Rain-washed air refreshed his face. Along with it came the noise of the city, but this was distant and familiar enough that Edwin would stop hearing it within minutes. He made tea and burned his finger on the kettle, and begrudged the amount of magic it took him to heal it and avoid the annoyance of having his cradling string rub against the sore spot for the next week.
The smaller of his two book parcels, when unwrapped, held a thin purple volume that was closer to a glorified pamphlet. Edwin opened it to a random page and read enough for his lips and his cock to twitch in unison, then set it aside and took the book from Geiger’s to his favourite velvet armchair in front of the fire.