The Antiquarian’s Object of Desire (Love’s Academic #3)

Chapter One

In history, there is no single point of beginning.

I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock

It had just gone six o’clock in the evening and nothing had exploded yet.

This was good news for the staff of the Minervaeum, London’s premier club for academics, where arguments and experiments all too often detonated into chaos.

They dared not relax, however, for the night was still young and the library full of historians.

No one is more dangerous than people who have little interest in the future.

Some fifty gentlemen cluttered the somber, book-lined chamber, enjoying sherry, nibbles, and a haze of pipe smoke. A few dozed in leather armchairs, for they had been up since the twelfth century, academically speaking, to prepare for a symposium that commenced the next morning.

Only one woman was present, alone at a table in a corner.

Several books lay open before her, and she consulted them as she wrote page after page of notes.

Lamplight dappled with rain shadows from a nearby window flickered over her tightly bound dark hair and black dress, making her seem evanescent, like a ghost trying to research a way back into life.

“Who is that charming creature?” asked Mr. Beaulieu, a junior professor who had come over from Paris for the symposium.

Studying the woman’s quiet poise as she sipped from a dainty porcelain cup, and noting in particular the lack of a wedding ring, he felt something stir in his heart where before there had been only midterm breaks and Brie cheese.

“That’s Amelia Tarrant,” Mr. Dummersby of the British Museum told him. It sounded rather the same as that’s a Viking ship coming toward us.

Beaulieu’s eyes widened. “The antiquarian professor from Oxford University?”

Dummersby nodded solemnly. “Correct.”

“Mon Dieu!” Beaulieu reared back, crossing himself. “In France we call her La Terrifiante Erudite.”

“In England we try not to call her anything, in case she hears us.”

They regarded the woman from behind the safety of their pipes. She set down her tea to stir it before laying the teaspoon on a napkin and taking another sip. Her eyes closed at the taste.

“She looks so genteel,” Beaulieu remarked rather wistfully.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Dummersby warned. “I once paid her a compliment and she’s refused to work with me ever since.”

“No!”

“Yes. I ask you, what kind of woman doesn’t like being told by a colleague that she has beautiful lips? And last week she argued with Professor Sterling over a magical candlestick, causing a fire that nearly burned down the Ashmolean Museum.”

“Mon Dieu!”

Dummersby gave a shrug that said quite plainly, it’s all you can expect from antiquarians. They were forever causing drama with magical antiques instead of just quietly reading about drama like proper historians.

“Sterling,” Beaulieu mused. “Isn’t he the one who found Jane Seymour’s lost ghost in a jewelry box?”

“That’s him. He and Tarrant are fierce enemies.”

“Fascinating,” Beaulieu murmured, eyeing Amelia once again. Then the library door swung open, admitting bright light from the corridor beyond and dazzling his attention. Beaulieu turned to see a man enter, reading a book as he walked.

Beaulieu gasped, for the newcomer was scandalously close to being naked.

Clad in nothing more than trousers and an open-collared shirt, he had no pomade in his blond hair, not even the merest hint of a mustache anywhere about him, and worse, his fingernails were polished with a red tint.

Beaulieu had never seen the like before, and was uncomfortably interested.

The man looked up from his book and, discovering a crowd of historians staring at him, blinked with surprise. “Good heavens,” he remarked mildly. “What have you done to the kitchen?”

“It’s next floor down,” someone called out.

“Oh.” He paused, seemingly hoping that the library might transform itself into a kitchen if he but waited a moment. Then he caught sight of the buffet table and, with a shrug, headed for it. Historians scattered from his path.

“Who is he?” Beaulieu whispered rather trepidatiously.

“That,” Dummersby intoned, “is Professor Caleb Sterling.”

Clink.

At the small, sharp sound, both historians jolted. Amelia Tarrant had set her cup down in its saucer. She stared across the room at Sterling.

THUD.

Now the entire gathering jolted as Sterling slammed his book shut. He stared back at Amelia.

Beaulieu had considered himself an expert on the Black Death until this moment, seeing the expression in Sterling’s eyes. Amelia, for her part, did not even blink.

“Oh dear,” Dummersby murmured. “Here we go again…”

—

Amelia watched coolly as Caleb approached. He took his time, pausing now and again to chat with people in the crowd, but he flashed her dark glances just to prove himself an absolute villain. She frowned in reply.

She’d not seen him since the Ashmolean incident. After the flames had been extinguished and the museum’s curators settled with tea and biscuits, she’d been summoned by Professor Ottersock, head of Oxford’s Material History faculty, and she’d made her attitude clear to him.

“I hate the man,” she declared (albeit in the polite, gently modulated tones of a well-brought-up lady for whom hatred was something expressed only in strictest privacy).

“I certainly did not intend to meet him in the museum at night. We argued, which is how the candlestick got dropped. It won’t happen again, I can assure you. ”

In response, Ottersock just looked at her over the glass of laudanum he was about to drink for his sudden migraine.

“Sterling is a scoundrel,” Amelia added for good measure. And then, worried that she’d gone too far—“He’s also an excellent historian and valued colleague, of course.”

“Sit down, Tarrant,” Ottersock said wearily, gesturing at a chair in front of his desk. “Talk to me about what’s going on for you.”

Good God. Amelia had not become an expert antiquarian and professor at the age of twenty-six by having conversations. “I’m fine,” she said, which was as emphatic an end to the matter as any British person could provide.

Ottersock sighed and scratched at his bushy gray sideburns.

“Let me put it another way. I want to know what on earth you were thinking, young lady! Mishandling a thaumaturgic candlestick and causing a fire is one thing, but a girl should not be working alone in a museum after dark, let alone bantering with a male colleague!”

“Arguing,” Amelia corrected him.

“Engaging in private intercourse,” he corrected her right back, with all the authority of a faculty head and older white male.

Amelia was so alarmed by this definition she nearly gasped aloud.

She’d barely escaped losing her position at Oxford earlier this year due to Caleb Sterling.

Although they had been friends since they met as eight-year-olds in boarding school, the moment Professor Throckmorton from Medieval Studies caught them hugging, that became impossible.

Throckmorton, caring not that Caleb had merely been consoling her after she received news of her grandfather’s death, had spread such malicious gossip that Amelia was officially told to either marry Caleb or quit her professorship.

After all, just because women had been admitted to tertiary education after Queen Charlotte demanded it a hundred years earlier didn’t mean they were free to act like men.

Heavens, if female academics started touching their male colleagues willy-nilly (so to speak), what would come next? Trousers on ladies?!

She’d survived the scandal, unmarried and employed, because no one would call Caleb and her friends these days. Indeed, they were the very model of foes. And yet still she felt her job in peril.

“I’m afraid I have no time to discuss the matter,” she told Ottersock.

“I’m going to Hereford to follow up on a clue about treasure in the cathedral there.

” Actually, she’d planned her departure for tomorrow, but getting out of town fast seemed the only way to avoid this talk. “My train leaves in two hours.”

Ottersock choked on his laudanum. “What? You can’t just run off! We haven’t finished our discussion! Sit down!”

Driven to desperate measures, Amelia looked at her wristwatch, then raised big, imploring eyes to the faculty head. Alarm that she might start crying blazed across Ottersock’s face.

“Fine,” he grumped. “Go! And for God’s sake, don’t blow anything up!”

She’d gone, only returning this afternoon in time for the symposium—and with absolutely no awareness whatsoever that Caleb also was staying at the Minervaeum.

Indeed, when Professor Jemeson from Cambridge University’s Classics faculty waylaid her in a corridor to inform her of this (“Now, don’t go burning down the club, little lady, ha ha…

Say, want to come to dinner with me?”), Amelia had expressed complete surprise.

Unfortunately, Jemeson had not told her about the pre-symposium drinks being held in the library, and now here Caleb was, walking toward her through a crowd of people trained to tell stories.

Amelia looked up to the ceiling’s painted heaven, but its frolicking cherubs offered no inspiration.

When she looked down again, Caleb was standing on the other side of the table, as if he’d magically folded space and time to reach her.

“Good evening, Mr. Sterling,” she said in a prim voice.

“Miss Tarrant,” he drawled. “Sitting alone in a corner, I see.”

“Hoping to avoid unpleasant company,” she replied pointedly.

He smirked. She stared. The atmosphere grew almost unbearably tense (perhaps because everyone in the library was holding their breath).

Then Caleb gave a dramatic sigh. Dropping into the chair opposite Amelia, he leaned forward, elbows on the table and chin set atop his linked fingers. His blue-eyed gaze seemed to twinkle behind wayward strands of hair. “Hello, Meely.”