42. An Extant Form of Magic
Briar is very against second homes on principle, but there’s no denying how useful it is that Westby’s family has a rarely used cottage in Norfolk by the sea, purchased by a holding company for nefarious tax reasons, with a very large security gate and unbroken views of the ocean from every southerly window.
It’s whitewashed, with blue shutters and driftwood sculptures in the garden. Westby seems to regard it as some sort of hovel.
‘I like your theory,’ he says to Bastian one afternoon, when they’ve been at Colby Cottage for a few days and nobody has come to kill them yet. ‘About how you got so terribly strong, I mean.’
Bastian has not been adjusting particularly well to Briar’s friends.
He twitches every time they brush past him or reach over him, like he’s not used to people taking such liberties, and stares at anybody who offers him a cup of tea for a while before accepting the offer.
As none of them are scholars of Temple any more, it seems they can look him in the eye. He’s not a fan.
Now, as they sit in the snug, a perfectly proportioned room in sunny shades of burnt orange arranged around a wood-burning stove, he watches Westby warily; academic theorising is one of the only places they can meet on solid ground.
‘Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? “As long as he is willing to give his utmost in return.” Most of us say that once and pretty much forget about it.
But you didn’t. You gave it your utmost, for entirely innocent reasons, no designs on power at all - and in return, you got so much you don’t know what to do with it.
I wonder if it’s replicable.’ He turns the page of the text he’s reading. ‘Probably not.’
It’s far from a theoretical question. The notifications on Tate’s phone are coming so thick and fast that at one point he panicked and put it in the freezer.
After they’d painstakingly recorded readings of the first few Workings - Healing from Briar’s text, Inquiry from the stolen first-year books - and uploaded them with no small amount of hesitation, the next step has been Westby’s lecture series; they’ve been spending hours every day filming study guides and introductions to thaumaturgy.
If Briar has to hear Westby say, ‘Hello all, and welcome back to our little corner of the internet,’ one more time, they’re going to throw Tate’s phone off the upper deck.
It hadn’t been clear if it would take, at first. Perhaps nobody would care.
Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to Work, without the texts right in front of them.
Half the people watching think it’s a joke, or a scam, or some grand conspiracy theory - but the other half are obsessed, can already Work, albeit amateurishly, and are devouring the videos faster than Tate can upload them.
Briar’s mum called, completely frantic, when she discovered on the news that a warrant had been put out for their arrest, Temple scrambling to get ahead of the story - but this was quickly superseded by videos of junior doctors performing actual magic, and since then, with a speed that’s frightened them all, Westby has become something of an oracle.
This seems to be why nobody has come to murder them in their beds.
It’s too late; Pandora’s box already cracked wide open, and with Westby as the very public face of thaumaturgy, there’s no way to get rid of him quietly.
The world is watching. Not even Bastian could wipe his face from the minds of everyone who’s searched ‘magic is real???’ in the past few hours alone.
When they’re not recording, they pore over the texts Eugenia rescued from the attic, Bastian and Westby leading the charge. Some of them are duds, or damaged beyond recognition - but some of them are so extraordinary that they almost trump Healing.
Defence, which seems to act as a sort of shield against malignant forces, both ordinary and magical.
Plenty, which purports to be able to strengthen harvests and redouble a flow of fresh water.
After discovering that one - a variation of the exact Working Westby’s been trying to write into existence for years - he had become so overwhelmed he’d taken off his jumper and run directly into the sea.
They bicker over these names, although that mostly seems pointless now.
The Working, the Work, thaumaturgy. Kay calls, and says that everybody on social media has just been calling it magic.
Briar studies every day, feeling like they’ll never catch up.
It’s okay. It still feels like a miracle, being able to do it at all.
In all the madness, there’s still one more question they need answered.
On the fourth day, they climb into a tiny, anonymous hire car with Tate and drive the fifty miles to Winterton-on-Sea. Eugenia’s car is no longer available to them - nor is Eugenia, who dropped them off and then sped away, saying something about spending some time abroad.
It’s easy enough to find Mr Grayson’s address with just a gentle application of Inquiry on Tate’s part. Briar wonders how long it’ll be until that stops being possible; if eventually, many Workings will cease to function, the world filled with too much knowledge.
They know now that thaumaturgy won’t be completely gone, even then. Based on Westby’s experimentation after Bastian burned his hand on the stove attempting porridge, Healing seems to work just fine on scholars who’ve already studied it. Plenty doesn’t require a targeted scholar at all.
They pull up outside a small house with a garden that leads straight down to the beach, and when they knock, a man in his sixties answers with a cat in one hand and a watering can in the other.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Hi, Mr Grayson. Sorry to turn up like this, I hope you don’t mind. We just wanted to ask you about your . . . friend,’ Briar says. ‘Robert Parker.’
‘Oh.’ Mr Grayson looks taken aback before he shrugs, then gestures for them to follow him. ‘You can come with me, I’m just watering my delphiniums. Call me Pete, I can’t stand being Mr Grayson, he sounds like an accountant or something.’
They both follow him around the side of the house and into the garden, where he deposits the fat tabby cat on the grass and begins to water. Behind him, the sea is choppy, white caps flashing across the horizon. ‘What can I help you with, then?’
‘We understand that . . . Mr Parker went missing, in the nineties,’ says Tate. ‘And we think we know why.’
‘You do, do you?’
‘Do you know what he did for a living?’ Briar asks.
‘No.’ The watering can tilts, pausing the flow. ‘He said sales, but I didn’t believe him. He told me it was better if I didn’t know. That it would keep me . . . safe. I always assumed he was probably a spy.’
Briar doesn’t even know where to begin.
‘Do you watch the news?’ they say, and they go from there.
When Pete has made tea for everyone, and that tea has gone cold on the kitchen table in front of them, he wipes his eyes and says, ‘A few people came around, at the start. Said they were some kind of special . . . police force. Investigating. And I wanted it investigated, so I let them in, and they had a look around, asked me some questions and left. It was strange, though, more like an interrogation than anything else, mostly about Rob’s work.
I knew nothing, and I told them that, and they seemed happy enough.
Well, actually, annoyed, like I’d wasted their time.
Years later, though, I was clearing out the attic and I found he’d been stashing something up there.
It was in a sort of . . . hidden compartment, I only noticed because the hinges had gone. ’
He fetches the stepladder, and Briar holds the base for him as he clambers up into the eaves, rummaging for a bit and swearing under his breath before he comes back down holding a single notebook, the Temple crest embossed on the front.
‘Here we are,’ he says, setting it down in the living room. ‘Couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but I kept it anyway. Kept all his things. Maybe you can make sense of some of that.’
Briar opens the notebook, and finds the single page of writing there . . . incomprehensible. It’s like trying to read the Work again for the first time; not only do the letters not form words, they hurt Briar’s brain.
‘I can’t read it,’ they say, handing the notebook to Tate.
Tate glances at the writing, then frowns. ‘What do you mean, you can’t read it?’
‘It’s like . . . gibberish.’
‘No it’s not,’ Tate says slowly. ‘It just says, south-east wall, second tree from the left, under the beach roses.’
‘It does?’ Pete sits up straighter in his chair. ‘Well, I know exactly where that’ll be.’
They bring the notebook with them into the garden, Pete leading the way.
‘Did you read that Working we found?’ Tate asks Briar quietly. ‘In his office, in the locked drawer? The one Westby said sounded like . . . a key?’
‘No,’ Briar says. ‘I didn’t.’
They find the spot, and then Pete has to fetch a spade. Briar offers to dig, but he insists on doing it himself, pausing every few swings to catch his breath and mop his brow.
Eventually, he hits something hollow. He does let Briar help him haul out the small trunk, and then they open it right there on the lawn.
Inside, there’s an ancient ring-bound folder, slightly warped from damp. There are documents, too, headed with the Temple school crest. Briar hands half of them to Tate and starts leafing through their stack. The contents are damning.
Requests and demands, addressed to the headmaster. Blatant insider trading. Blackmail. Vast sums of money on offer to solve legal and political problems that need to be waved away with the help of thaumaturgy.
Tate lets out a whistle. ‘How the hell did he get these out?’
‘He was going to ruin them,’ Briar says, trying to show Tate a letter from a previous Prime Minister, begging a quick and deeply unethical favour.