Chapter Nine
Beggars and kings alike bow to the power of magic.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
“Well, this is unexpected,” Amelia said as she and Caleb stood in the dining room five minutes later. From out in the hallway, where they had insisted the others remain, Lady Ruperta called through the closed door, “Is everything all right?”
Amelia and Caleb exchanged a taut glance. Amelia tilted her head toward the door…Caleb shook his…She frowned…He gave a much-put-upon sigh and trudged across the room and opened the door a crack.
“Everything’s just fine,” he lied. “But best you stay out for a little longer. Maybe go have some brandy while you wait?”
Amelia heard only a murmur of replies, shot through with one sharp Nigel! Then Caleb closed the door and turned back to the room.
“What the hell are we going to do about this?” he asked bemusedly.
“I don’t know,” Amelia admitted.
They stared in troubled silence at the scene.
Everything seemed exactly as it had been before the percussive disturbance.
The dinner was undisturbed on the table, the books neatly lined up on their shelves.
The clock continued to tick backward, no trace of blue-tinted enchantment about it now.
Amelia felt frazzlement encroach upon her nerves yet again, for there was only one thing worse than magic exploding during your first evening on assignment: it not exploding, when you made everyone run out of the room because you thought that it would.
“I could have sworn there was a sonic detonation,” she said, “but perhaps I misheard.”
“You didn’t,” Caleb told her. “And you know what it was.”
She looked at him with some surprise, for only rarely had she heard that tone of voice from him: light, friendly, but with an unyielding quality that explained why his students were always successful despite his apparently lackadaisical approach to teaching them.
“No, I don’t know,” she said. “The clock—”
“Is not responsible. Tell me, Meely, what you were thinking just before things went boom.”
“Sonic detonation,” she corrected him.
“Whatever.”
Amelia frowned, trying to remember what her thoughts had been.
“I admit, I was annoyed about Sir Nigel not taking my professional word, but that was hardly enough— Wait. The butler was about to carve the swans, and I couldn’t stand the thought of watching them being—” She shuddered, unable to finish that sentence.
Thwack.
They turned to see a book lying on the floor.
Thwack. Another flung itself from its shelf to join the first.
Caleb turned back to Amelia, brows raised. Apparently she was supposed to divine some meaning from this expression.
“It is not my fault,” she retorted, for indeed she’d always been able to read Caleb’s face.
He contrived to lift his brows even higher.
“Well, really,” Amelia huffed. “There’s no need to be rude.
Are you suggesting I have some kind of telekinetic power, as if I were a Saxon brooch or—or—?
” Feeling her temper grow hot, she stopped, taking a deep, calming breath.
How well this worked can be evidenced by the way half the candles in the room suddenly flickered and went out.
Shadows wavered across Caleb’s face like a told you so.
“If you’ll excuse me, please,” she said with an attitude she’d have liked to call serene but that was actually closer to stony. “I want to locate the real source of the thaumaturgic emissions.”
But before she could turn away, Caleb stepped toward her.
His silence was intent, holding her rooted to the spot, and Amelia watched with some trepidation as he took another step.
He drew so close she could see old London darkness in his sky blue eyes, reminding her that he’d been raised among criminals and that a few sharp fragments of their unscrupulous teachings remained at the back of his psyche.
He set one hand against her hip and began to glide it slowly downward.
Such a force of frazzlement erupted in Amelia’s stomach that she felt like a thaumaturgically charged wedding ring in the court of Henry VIII. Then Caleb found what he was looking for: the pocket in her skirt. As he slipped his hand inside, he smiled crookedly.
You are a fiend!—is what Amelia would have told him had she been able to speak.
But dry throated and half-deaf from the thudding roar of her own pulse, she could only stare at him furiously while he rummaged in that secret place.
Behind him, a saltcellar (circa early eighteenth century, trifooted, sterling silver, Amelia’s brain noted automatically) began rising from the dining table, salt flying out of it in a slow, glittering eruption of thaumaturgic energy.
The crystals twinkled like stars in the gilded shadows.
Caleb’s fingers moving against her thigh made Amelia feel like she had a similar constellation of salt and sorcery inside her own body.
And from the expression in Caleb’s eyes, he knew it.
“Fiend,” she managed to whisper at last.
“If you say so, darling,” he answered, his voice soft yet gritty, making that internal constellation swirl. Slowly, he withdrew his hand and held it up to reveal what he’d taken from the pocket.
Amelia flickered a glance at it. She would not have been a Tarrant if her facial expression altered when it found an alteration of her understanding, but it must be said that her eyelashes became a tempest. “Oops,” she said succinctly.
Caleb flipped the Hereford teaspoon around his fingers. “One would have thought you’d have put this in a safe bag as soon as you got the opportunity,” he remarked.
“Yes, well, I meant to,” Amelia said with an arch dignity she did not actually feel in that moment. “But I was in a hurry to change for dinner.”
“I note you did change. That’s a different dress you’re wearing. Yet somehow the teaspoon ended up transferred to its pocket instead of a safe bag.”
“There must be a confoundment aspect to its magic,” Amelia said. The thought immediately excited her, and she reached for the teaspoon so she might inspect it for some evidence of this theory. But Caleb held it up, out of her reach.
“Perhaps you’re enchanted and don’t know it,” he said.
Amelia’s eyes narrowed as she regarded him. “Perhaps you are mistaken in a belief that you can condescend to me.”
She spoke in a markedly polite tone that warned him to either apologize or face the consequences, and in response, Caleb did what any friend would under these circumstances: stepping back until he met the edge of the dining table, he held the teaspoon behind him.
Amelia’s eyes grew wide with incredulity. “You’re stealing my artifact!”
“Your artifact has developed a thaumaturgic connection to your emotions,” Caleb replied calmly. “I’ll take it upstairs and put it in one of my safe bags.”
This was actually a good plan, reasonable, professional, and utterly unacceptable. “It’s mine,” Amelia said, stepping into the gap Caleb had created between them.
“Is it precious to you?” he asked with a touch of sardonic humor.
“What?” She gave him a bewildered look. “No. I’m in the middle of studying it, that’s all. By the way, have you noticed the saltcellar hovering behind you, sending out magic like darts?”
“Don’t try to change the subject.”
“I’m more concerned about the cellar’s magic changing you.” She took another step forward, and Caleb promptly climbed onto a chair. Good heavens, did he think himself eight years old again?
No, scratch that. The last time he climbed on furniture was three months ago, jumping atop a desk to cajole his students into admiring a gold statuette of Anubis. (“Carpe dius!”)
“Get down,” Amelia ordered him, sounding so bossy Mr. Dummersby from the British Museum would have felt vindicated in his fear manly mistrust of her.
“Nope,” Caleb said, shaking his head. “I’m worried you’ve been ensorcelled by this spoon, Meely.”
“You’re the one refusing to let it go,” Amelia pointed out. “I don’t care anymore. That saltcellar is a far greater worry.” Hoisting her skirts, she climbed onto the chair next to his.
Boom!
Thaumaturgic energy burst from the saltcellar, making Amelia sway on the chair. She stretched out her arms to balance herself.
“Please do be careful,” Caleb said mildly.
“Never mind me,” she replied, flapping a hand at him. “Grab the cellar!”
Muttering under his breath about the peace and quiet of the city he could be enjoying right now, Caleb clambered onto the tabletop. Carefully avoiding plates and glasses, he reached for the little silver dish.
It promptly leaped higher.
“Tsk,” Amelia said, climbing onto the table alongside him. “Why are you not taller?”
Caleb steadied her as she nudged aside a bowl of fruit to clear a space in which to stand. “I’m tall enough for the important things,” he said, and bent some five inches to kiss her forehead.
“That’s very charming,” Amelia told him dryly, “but please concentrate on the matter at hand. Or, more accurately, not at hand.”
They looked up at the saltcellar where it floated just beyond reach, a tiny moon within a drift of salt stars.
“Pretty,” Caleb said.
“Dangerous,” Amelia countered.
He shrugged.
Suddenly, tiny beams of magic shot out from the cellar, stabbing one of the books on the shelves. A cloud of typeset letters burst forth and began flapping around the room in a broken, scattered manner, like modern poetry.
Amelia frowned. “We need to—”
“Waltz beneath the salty starlight?” Caleb suggested.
“Constrain the saltcellar,” she told him chidingly.
“I’ll hit it with the teaspoon.”
Amelia clicked her tongue. “You will not. There’s a good chance the cellar isn’t especially magical in itself but is absorbing the teaspoon’s energy, just as the clock did. Bringing the two into contact could be disastrous.”
Caleb’s eyes twinkled with luminous, salted magic. “We could always try what we did in the Staveley pub to stop the enchantment.”