Freya Marske

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 could breathe into the knots in the back of his neck. And he could feel out the edges of the aching, yearning space in his life that no amount of quiet and no number of words had yet been able to fill.
Edwin had no idea what he ached for, no real sense of the shape of his ideal future. He only knew that if every day he made himself a little bit better—if he worked harder, if he learned more, more than anyone else—he might find it.

Reginald Gatling’s doom found him beneath an oak tree, on the last Sunday of a fast-fading summer.

He sat breathing rapidly and with needle-stabs at each breath, propped against the oak. His legs were unfelt and unmoving like lumps of wax that had somehow been affixed to the rest of him. Resting his hands on the numb bulk of them made him want to vomit, so he clutched weakly at grass instead. The tree’s rough bark found skin through one of the tears in his bloodstained shirt. The tears were his own fault; he hadn’t started to run in time, and so the best route of escape had appeared to be through a tangle of bramble-hedge that edged the lake here in St. James’s Park. The brambles had torn his clothes.

The blood was from what had come after.

Reggie coughed, trying to banish the nonsense simmering in his mind. His ribs spasmed with renewed pain.

“George,” Reggie said. An appeal.

The calm-voiced George was facing out into the park, presenting Reggie with a view of the silken back of his waistcoat and the white of his shirtsleeves: cuffs rolled up fastidiously, but still speckled with blood. He was surveying the open green space at the foot of the slight incline crowned by the oak tree.

Men lay dozing with boaters tipped over their faces, or nibbled on grass blades as they reclined on an elbow and turned the pages of a book.

None of these people looked back at George, or at Reggie, or at the other man; and even if they did, their gazes passed on without focus or concern. None of them had so much as glanced over when the screaming had started. Nor when it continued.

Reggie could only just glimpse the pearly whisper of uneven air that signified the curtain-spell.

George turned, stepped closer, and hunkered down, careful with his trousers, brushing a speck of dirt from the polished toe of his shoe. Reggie’s entire body, wax-legs and all, tried to flinch back from George’s smile. His nerves remembered pain and wanted to press the body itself into the rough bark, through it—to dissolve somehow.

Reggie, my dear boy.” George sighed. “Shall we try this again? I know you found part of it on your own, and thought you could get away with hiding it from us.”

Reggie stared at him. The sharp, surprised wail of a child who’d likely scraped his knee rose somewhere in the distance.

“What earthly good did you think it would do you?” George asked. “You, of all people?” He stood again—the question clearly rhetorical—and made a curt gesture to his companion, who took his place in front of Reggie.

Get on with it, thought Reggie, squinting at the uncovered ball of the sun. Hurl yourself at us. Now would be ideal.

“You found the thing. You snatched it. Now, tell us what it is,” the man demanded.

“I can’t,” said Reggie, or tried to. His tongue spasmed.

The man brought his hands together. There was no finesse to his technique, but by God he was fast; his fingers flickered through the crude shapes of the cradles and came alive with the white glow of his spell before Reggie could so much as inhale. Then he took hold of Reggie’s hands. His grip was inescapable. His heavy brows drew together and he frowned down at Reggie’s palms as though he were about to read Reggie’s fortune and tell him what his future would be.

Short, thought Reggie hysterically, and then the white crawled over his skin and he screamed again. By the time it ended, one of his fingers stood at an awful angle where it had twitched itself out of the man’s grip.

The pain of the bind gave a wary pulse, and Reggie didn’t dare test his voice. But this time his hands lifted when he told them to, and he waved them frantically.

This time, Reggie managed to indicate the building itself: ironically, yes, a bare stone’s throw to the east from where they were, though Reggie’s finger fell closer to Whitehall than the St. James’s end.

“Your office?” For the first time George sounded surprised.

Reggie managed to nod before the dormant bind seared up in punishment. He barely noticed when the map flickered into nothing. He kept his tongue thrust out as though he could somehow shove the pain away, and tears ran down his face. The two men were looking across the park in the direction of the building.