The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [95]
Quentin knew Plover had been rich—he’d made one fortune in America already, selling dry goods, whatever they were, before he came to Cornwall and wrote the Fillory novels—but the scale of it was still stunning. It wasn’t so much a house as a cliff with windows in it.
“Jeez,” Josh said.
“Yeah,” said Poppy.
“Hard to imagine somebody living there all by themselves,” Quentin said.
“He probably had servants.”
“Was he gay?”
“Dude, totally,” Josh said.
There was a sign on the gate, DARRAS HOUSE/PLOVER FARM, with a schedule of hours and tours and entrance fees. A blue plaque gave them a capsule biography of Plover. It was a Thursday, and the house was open. A large black bird retched loudly in the underbrush.
“So are we going in?” Poppy asked.
He’d thought they would, on the off chance that they might stumble on something, and so they could say they had. But now that they’d arrived the place felt empty. Nothing here called to Quentin. Plover had never gone to Fillory. All he’d done was write books. The magic was somewhere else.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
Nobody disagreed. They could come back tomorrow. If they were still on Earth.
They trooped back across the road and spread out the map on the hood of the car. The exact location of the house the Chatwins had stayed at near Fowey was a matter for speculation, but not wild speculation. There was a limited number of places it could be. Plover’s books were full of enchanting descriptions of how the Chatwin kids, singly and en masse, ran and skipped and cycled over from their aunt Maude’s house to visit their beloved “uncle” Christopher. Plover had even famously had a little child-size gate built in the wall that separated their properties to let them through.
They had two Plover biographies with them, one a soft-focus hagiography from the 1950s, authorized by the family, the other a hardnosed psychoanalytic exposé from the early 1990s that anatomized Plover’s complex and “problematic” sexuality, as symbolically dramatized in the various Fillory novels. They stuck to that one. It had better geography.
They knew that the Chatwin house was on one Darrowby Lane, which helped, although the Cornish were even less interested in signage than the Venetians. Fortunately Poppy turned out to be excellent at this kind of cross-country dead-reckoning navigation. At first they thought she must be using some kind of advanced geographical magic until Josh noticed that she had an iPhone in her lap.
“Yeah, but I used magic to jailbreak it,” she said.
It was late afternoon, and they’d traversed what seemed like several hundred verdant and Watership Down–esque but stubbornly unmarked and unidentifiable rural byways, and the light was turning bluish, before they settled on a target property, which sat on a narrow lane that wasn’t definitely not called Darrowby and as near as they could tell pretty much had to back onto Plover’s enormous estate.
There was no wall or gate, just a gravel track curving back through the late-summer trees. A square stone post next to it supported a NO TRESPASSING sign. They couldn’t see the house from here.
Quietly Julia read out the relevant passage from The World in the Walls:
The house was very grand—three stories tall, with a façade made of brick and stone, and enormous windows, and endless numbers of fireplaces and window seats and curving back stairs and other advantages, which their London house distinctly lacked. Among those advantages were the sprawling grounds around the house, which included long straight alleys and white gravel paths and dark-green pools of grass.
There was a time when Quentin could probably have said it along with her