Chapter Sixteen
Nature is to be treasured. After all, it is where battles
take place, determining the fate of kingdoms.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
“Damn,” Caleb swore as Amelia climbed off his lap. “Must we constantly be bloody interrupted by goddamn bloody magic?”
“Tsk.” Amelia did not stop to frown at him over the use of such language, for twinkles of thaumaturgic energy were luring her attention instead.
“It’s coming from outside,” she said, crossing to the window (although it must be confessed she walked a little unsteadily, and inside, her heart—or perhaps some other organ—was saying damn, damn with as much fervor as Caleb had).
“Uh-huh,” he answered in a rather pained tone.
But he remained in the chair, with an annoying, but not altogether uncharacteristic, reluctance to get up and do work.
Now Amelia did frown, turning back with the intention of chiding him into joining her in a search for the magic’s source.
No words escaped her throat, however, for she was struck mute by the sight that confronted her.
Immediately, Caleb leaned forward, ostensibly reaching for the whiskey bottle, but the damage had been done.
The loss forever hereafter of one part of her brain had been achieved.
For Amelia knew she’d make a museum room of it, or perhaps even a shrine, so that she could revisit daily the image of Caleb’s prodigious arousal.
(Then again, perhaps he’d simply put an antique in his pants for some reason Amelia attempted to construct before her intelligence stepped in and told her to stop being a ninny. Her degree might be in history, but that didn’t mean she was ignorant about biology.)
Nevertheless, friends do not think about other friends’ stiffened phalluses, she lectured herself.
Sh, her brain replied, busy setting up a display plinth and special lighting.
Perhaps now was a good time to tell Caleb that her feelings for him lately went beyond friendship.
Or, rather, not now, considering magic was glinting throughout the attic like a sugar bowl had exploded, but soon.
Around the same time that she told him she’d seen his memories.
And confessed about the letter she’d almost sent to Ottersock.
And asked his opinion of Mary Wollstonecraft too, although that was perhaps less pressing.
Besides, she didn’t think she could quite deal with the pain of sharing her heart and having him tell her—kindly, with a smile—that all he felt in return was friendship. Deep, precious, loving friendship, but not the kind of romantic adoration that she was beginning to identify within herself.
Arousal did not count; that was just science. Then again, the way he’d looked at her in that memory she’d experienced…
A conversation was definitely in order. Just as soon as she’d fixed this latest problem.
With a remarkable degree of self-discipline, even for a Tarrant, Amelia turned back to the window.
The rain had stopped, the sky was limp and exhausted, and altogether the view resembled nothing so much as a towel that you reach for after your bath only to discover it is damp.
One exception to this drabness did exist: a fountain of sparkling white and gold light erupting from a stony field some distance from the manor house.
That’s quite the exception, Amelia thought wryly. There being no one in sight, and Guy Fawkes Night still some time away, she presumed it was not a species of firework. Damn. She was going to have to go out in the cold and the wind to investigate.
“No,” Caleb said emphatically.
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked, watching the magical fountain shoot stars that spun and flared in the breeze.
“You’re doing that standing-straighter thing you do before you plow into action, which means that you’ll be wanting me to plow too. But I’m not going out in that cold, Meely, absolutely not. I don’t earn enough to justify tramping through farmland.”
Amelia turned to give him a crooked smile.
He met her gaze—then glanced at her still-unbuttoned shirtwaist—then looked into her eyes once more with an expression that suggested he was not going walking anywhere, but was however willing to undertake a different, more horizontal kind of exercise.
The air between them sparkled, and not entirely due to the discharging magic.
For one second, Amelia considered abandoning her professional duty, her definition of friendship, her completely reasonable caution, and every last good sense remaining in her, to climb Caleb as if he were a library ladder.
But a thaumaturgic eruption in proximity to a house full of antiques, many of which were magical themselves, was really not to be ignored. Alas. She began to rebutton her shirtwaist.
“I am going out to determine the source and stop it if I can,” she informed Caleb coolly.
He groaned, collapsing against the arm of his chair in dramatic, seven-year-old fashion, and Amelia clicked her tongue at him.
“It’s fine, you can stay here. Make yourself nice and cozy, and I’ll let you know the results of my investigation when I return. ”
—
Caleb leaned back in the armchair as he sipped whiskey. The attic was wonderfully peaceful, and he felt so warm and comfortable that he began to drift toward the restful bliss of a nap.
Or at least he did in his imagination. In actual reality, he trudged through a field that could better be described as a mass of sheep dung, mud, and thistles with some grass strewn among it. His trouser cuffs were soaked, his shoes ruined. “Slow down, Meely,” he called out, but Amelia ignored him.
“I’m certain the flash of magic came from over there,” she said, pointing to a boulder some distance across the fields.
“Or maybe there,” she added, indicating now a red-gold oak tree some other distance away.
(Yards and feet meant nothing to Caleb; as a historian, the only reason he ever needed to calculate distance was when he wanted a hot drink from Jabbercoffee but was due to lecture across the other side of town in half an hour’s time.)
Both boulder and tree formed mere silhouettes in the fading light.
A sinister band of red along the western horizon, like the blood of the lost day, warned that soon night would be fully upon them.
It was worrying, but not entirely a surprise, considering they had spent hours tramping around, looking for magic.
The eruption of luminous thaumaturgic energy had disappeared by the time they’d managed to sneak out of the house without being seen by anyone (except two footmen, who had opened the door for them and offered umbrellas, which Amelia, cruel woman, refused on the basis that it “didn’t look like it was going to rain,” as if they were in some country other than England).
Caleb did not know whether to be pleased that the magic hadn’t resurged—after all, it was good news for the safety of Ravenscroft Manor’s residents—or annoyed, since it was bad, bad news for his shoes.
Hours! he reiterated grumpily, although not verbally, since he’d rather not receive another of Amelia’s frowns, even if she did look cute making them.
Oh sure, if one wanted to be pedantic, it was more like fifty minutes, but even so.
Far too much time. And Caleb wasn’t the only one to think so.
His stomach agreed with him most emphatically.
“We’re missing dinner,” he told Amelia in dire tones.
“They’ll leave us some,” she replied, unconcerned.
“We’re going to get lost,” he tried instead.
“The house is rather hard to miss,” she pointed out. “It’s that big stone thing behind you.”
“Five miles behind me.”
“Half a mile at the most.”
“Aahhh! A mosquito just bit my hand!”
“Oh dear.”
“If I come down with malaria…or worse, if I get an unsightly bite on my face…the tragedy will be— Ugh, what did I just step in?”
“Sheep shit, probably,” Amelia replied complacently, which silenced Caleb for several minutes due to sheer astonishment.
And perhaps just a touch of arousal. All right, quite a lot of arousal.
Indeed, he’d have pulled her down to the ground and kissed more uncouth language from her mouth if only said ground was dry, clean, and a feather bed.
“It must be around here somewhere,” Amelia muttered, pausing in front of a purple flowering shrub. “Hydrangeas are summer blooms, so magic clearly is afoot.” She glared at the shrub as if she could frighten its secrets out of it.
Caleb took the opportunity to consider her carefully.
She was pale, despite all the exercise, and the way she crossed her arms suggested it wasn’t just her usual professorial stance, but an attempt to warm herself.
He’d have given her his coat but he’d not brought it.
The two of them had gone out in shirtsleeves like a pair of idiotic city dwellers who would almost certainly develop pneumonia as a result.
He turned his attention to the sky, serious now.
It was purpled with age, bruised by dark clouds that threatened more wild weather to come.
The wind smelled of mountains and dusky loneliness as it rushed down from the Scottish Highlands like an invading medieval army.
It had nigh on defeated Amelia’s prim coiffure, and Caleb hated to think about the state of his own.
“ ‘Dreary winds foreboding call the darkness down again,’ ” he warned.
Amelia gave him a bewildered look. “What?”
“It’s going to rain,” he clarified in blunt prose. “And we’ll—”
“Develop pneumonia,” she inserted a little wearily.
“No,” he said, offended that she would assume he was thinking such a thing (even though he had been). “I was going to say that we’ll have to race back to the house.”
“I’m sure you’ll survive,” Amelia told him, although her attention was veering again to the shrub. “I’ve watched you run across Mayfair to get the Duke of Bedford’s clock before Professor Murkle did.”
“That was sprinting. I’m not made for going the distance.”