If by not entirely unfamiliar she had meant to lump him in with that – well, that lump, Barnaby nearly missed it. Surely he wasn’t such a nuisance! His company was a gift. She couldn’t possibly mean that.
He didn’t have time to query it, besides; she had a confession. Half-veela. Barnaby didn’t think he had ever met one, in his lifetime – the magical society he had known had been a little more insular, then, and he doubted if old Queen Bess would have stood for any competition from the sort... but he had read a little about them, seen illustrations of the angry beaked things they became.

He looked at Miss Chevalier with a little newfound uncertainty. Half-veela, she had said: perhaps it was not all so bad as that. She seemed rather miserable about it, her supernatural beauty... but his expression softened, for he was not about to make her feel any worse. He drifted sidelong, a little without meaning to. “I do not know if it works on me. Most magic is lost on spirits, you see,” he admitted, because he was impervious to most spells and enchantments, unless they were the spirit-specific sort. (Except – did that make it yet worse, that his being a plague to her was just sheer bad luck, another unhappy helping of attention? He hadn’t meant it to be.)

It was a pity that touch was lost on spirits, too, or he might have reached out to pat her shoulder in sympathy. “We spirits are no strangers to odd looks, though,” Barnaby said wryly, because he certainly received the gawking, if not the rest. Frankly, he would have preferred the fawning.

Still, in some attempt to cheer her up, he managed a chuckle and a silly joke – “Which of our curses do you suppose is worst, overall?”

---

“I try not to let it bother me much,” Barnaby corrected gently, because that was really all one could do to come to terms with their lot, when their lot had been unchanged for three centuries. That was rather a long time to mourn oneself, even by his own self-centred standards.

And it was lonely: that was the worst of it. And, he considered wistfully, that some things were forever beyond his reach. To feel – to be loved – even to manage the barest touch. He suffered more than he let on, and even felt a pang of it here, because even Mr. Browne, the dead herring, would be set above him in those categories, no matter what he did.

“I am a most accomplished mathematician,” Barnaby declared grandiosely, half to amuse her and half to cover his despair, as he began to count vials on the shelves. “I am at your service,” he added, with a nod to express his surrender, that he understood. No more hospital visits, then. Banished to the streets like a dog. Such was his lot.

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