Chapter Twelve
“There are no facts, only interpretations” is itself a statement
of supposed fact, and shows that philosophy is shaky ground
for the wise historian. Objective observation alone can be safe.
A pipe is just a pipe (unless it is enchanted to be a trumpet).
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
There followed a period of misery such as Amelia had not experienced since her earliest days at school.
Sorting through old, dusty bric-a-brac, inspecting each piece so scrupulously that her eyes watered, noting everything down with painstaking detail in manila notebooks—it ought to have been great fun.
Usually, the only thing that satisfied her better was sitting undisturbed on a rainy afternoon, reading a good book.
(Which, alas, speaks poorly for the few young men who over the years had slipped past Caleb’s protective eye in the hopes of seducing her.) But all too soon Amelia became doleful.
She’d known things would be bad the moment she saw Mr. Dummersby at the breakfast table.
One thing a historian really excelled at was predicting the future, and in any case, Dummersby’s smirk represented a flashing arrow pointing the way.
Having traveled up to Cumbria to spy on Amelia and Caleb for gossiping purposes “deliver more packing materials, lest Miss Tunnicliffe did not bring enough,” the museum curator announced that he intended to stay on and “help with the assignment.” Not even Amelia’s most severely polite look could deter him.
“My presence will streamline things. I can tell you what the museum will most want from Sir Nigel’s collection. For example, we’re especially keen for anything contemporaneous with—”
Suddenly, he slapped his own face, causing the pipe to drop from his lips and a fleck of bacon to fly across the table, landing in Vanity’s porridge bowl.
Everyone stared at him bemusedly (except Vanity, who stared at her contaminated breakfast with the particular horror of someone who knows they have to eat it or else risk offending their boss).
“Darned nuisance,” Dummersby said, rubbing his cheek.
“Been suffering from a magic-induced tic ever since that kerfuffle in the Minervaeum’s library.
” He attempted to frown pointedly at Amelia but was too scared to look her in the eye, so directed the censure over her shoulder, where a footman caught it and almost burst into tears.
“What a shame,” Caleb said. “Do you know the trigger? Was it something you said?”
“Hm,” Dummersby murmured repressively through his mustache.
“ ‘Keen’?” Caleb guessed with such a brilliant show of innocence he ought to have won an award for it. “ ‘Anything’? ‘With’? ‘Espec—’ ”
“Contemporaneous,” Dummersby snapped, seemingly helpless to resist the bait, and promptly slapped himself again.
The corner of Caleb’s mouth twitched ever so slightly. “Oh dear,” he sympathized…
And then proceeded throughout the week to maneuver Dummersby into saying contemporaneous as often as possible. Which, considering they were historians, proved easier than one might assume.
The museum curator was old-school in his professional approach, which is to say, highly skilled at taking the concept of “streamlining” and tying it up in knots.
For example, “That mustache cup would look fabulous in a display of 1830s ephemera,” he told Amelia on the Friday morning, even before breakfast was finished, requiring her to explain in diplomatic terms that not only did said cup lack any thaumaturgic charge, but furthermore Sir Nigel was drinking from it at that moment.
“We need more pieces from the Restoration,” he informed her on Saturday, as if she could somehow make the Regency-era comb in her hand age one hundred years.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come work for me, my dear?” he asked her on Sunday, Tuesday, and twice on Wednesday. “You would add such decoration to our team.” These inducements stopped only when a portrait of Bloody Queen Mary screamed “Pervert! Pervert!” at him with uncannily helpful timing.
Worse, his presence convinced Throckmorton to stay.
The two men, although never having met before, became instant chums on the basis of their mutual preoccupation with Caleb and Amelia’s business.
They followed the pair through the manor, ostensibly to study medieval architecture and interesting antiques but seeming more interested in trying to spark arguments.
“Heard Sterling say history’s an art,” Throckmorton remarked with an overtly casual air to Amelia on Saturday afternoon. She was at the time holding steady a ladder upon which Vanity stood to reach a crystal vase on a shelf in the first-floor gallery, and so could not escape a conversation.
“I fear you must have misheard him,” she answered politely. “Professor Sterling believes that the study of history is a branch of the sciences.”
“Nope.” Throckmorton puffed a few ostentatious smoke rings, and the ladder trembled in Amelia’s grip. “ ‘Facts? Boring!’ ” he quoted in a deep, lazy voice that Amelia supposed was meant to impersonate Caleb’s. “ ‘Give fun interpretations—stories!—instead.’ ”
Just then, Caleb himself entered the gallery, and Amelia’s attention swiveled instantly to him. “Eep!” Vanity squeaked, clutching at the edge of the shelf as the ladder swayed.
“Excuse me, Professor Sterling.”
At Amelia’s clipped tone, everyone in the room unconsciously stood up straighter, except Vanity, for whom good posture had become less of a concern, more a future hope, and Caleb, who slanted his head and smiled at her.
“Do you think that historical facts are boring and we should apply artistic license when teaching them?” she interrogated him.
Caleb looked surprised; then his eyes narrowed as he considered the question. “What facts are we talking about?”
“Eep!” Vanity squealed again pointedly as Amelia abandoned the ladder to set her hands on her hips instead.
“It doesn’t matter what facts! Stories are no substitute for documented evidence.”
“Oh ho, here we go.” Throckmorton chuckled, nudging Dummersby.
Caleb shrugged. “Eh. An interesting poem or legend does enliven—”
“Legend?!”
CRASH!
This, fortunately, was not the sound of Vanity falling from the ladder, but of a small dish nearby that spontaneously exploded. Ceramic fragments and sparks of hot blue magic shot through the gallery.
“Oh no!” Sir Nigel cried out. “My seventeenth-century creamware butter dish from Staffordshire!” He ran about gathering the pieces, yelping as they burned him with magic, and in the process almost knocking Vanity once and for all off the ladder.
“Hold on, Miss Tunnicliffe!” Caleb said, and hastened across to grasp the ladder and steady it.
Amelia, thus belatedly noticing Vanity’s predicament, grabbed hold of the other side also.
The two of them looked at each other across the rungs.
Caleb winked; Amelia frowned. “Are you all right?” Caleb asked.
“F-fine thank you,” Vanity answered as she carefully descended the ladder. Upon reaching the ground’s safety, she looked around repeatedly and without any interest in her polite demurrals.
Amelia dragged her attention away from Caleb to the girl. “It must have had psycho-conjunctive properties,” she said.
“Psycho-conjunctive,” Vanity repeated, sounding out the syllables carefully, as if they might explode too.
“It’s a powerful thaumaturgic energy.”
Vanity perked up, her near death apparently forgotten. “Ooh! Psycho conjunctivitis, you say?” She giggled, thus making it impossible to know if she was joking or irredeemably stupid. “Is there anything else here like it?”
“Be careful asking Miss Tarrant such questions,” Dummersby advised with an unpleasant little laugh. “She’ll break your brain with her answer.”
Amelia smiled at Vanity with such calm steadiness, she could have been mistaken for a kindergarten teacher. Before she could summon a dignified remark, however, Caleb spoke.
“Dummersby, old chap, would you mind getting my magnifying glass from the drawing room?”
“Hmph, hmph,” Dummersby replied, which was Fuddy-Duddy Academic dialect for I suppose, if I must.
“Cheers. And while you’re there, would you check if there’s a vase that’s contempis—contempter—”
“Contemporaneous,” Dummersby corrected him automatically.
Slap!
—
The presence of academia’s foremost tattletales denied Amelia any opportunity to share a pleasant conversation with Caleb, let alone kiss him senseless (in the name of social science, that is).
Instead, she was forced to maintain their pretense of hostility, spurred on by Throckmorton’s jibes.
This quickly lost its spark, not to mention its store of interesting insults.
At the start of the week, she was denouncing Caleb as a “diabolically impertinent miscreant who would make the traitor Simon de Montfort seem like a good friend in comparison.” By the end, he was a “brat.”
“Okay,” he would answer with a careless shrug in any case—which quite honestly almost made Amelia want to fight him for real.
“It is not okay,” she replied more than once, driven by tetchiness to use slang.
Each time, Vanity would glance sidelong at her and then the surrounding stacks of antiques, expecting another explosion.
And Amelia, hating how tense her every muscle had become, tried not to cry with emotional exhaustion.
A Tarrant never cried. She herself had not done so since she was eight, and it would be infuriating should two mean-spirited men drive her to it now.
Accordingly, she clenched her muscles tighter and set a tranquil smile upon her face, and if there existed a number of puncture holes in her notebook where her pencil tip had stabbed through the pages, that was not, despite appearances, to the point.