Chapter One #2
Amelia glanced at the historians behind him, who hastily looked away as if they possessed no interest whatsoever in the conversation. “Please leave, Mr. Sterling,” she replied. “I’m trying to work.”
“You needn’t call me Mr. Sterling when we’re alone.” He grinned with appallingly winsome charm. “Professor will do fine.”
How anyone could make such a respectable title sound indecent, Amelia did not know. “We aren’t alone,” she pointed out. “There are fifty other people in the room.”
“When I’m with you, it feels as if the rest of the world vanishes.”
Amelia rolled her eyes.
“Speaking of vanishing,” he continued, “you fled after the Ashmolean fire—”
“I went to Hereford,” she corrected him.
“I’ve been worried.”
“Nonsense. You’ve been sleeping half the day and reading”—she angled her head to see the title of his book, and her nose wrinkled—“Byron.”
“Of course I’ve been reading Byron,” he retorted, as if it were obvious. “My best friend disappeared into the ether!”
“Sh!” Amelia glanced again at the crowd, but they had given up hope of scandal and returned to their conversations. “I only went out of town for a few days. That’s hardly a good reason to succumb to Romantic poetry.”
“Was it because I got my eyebrows shaped and you were overwhelmed by their beauty?” he asked with apparent sincerity.
Amelia tsked. “No, I—” She paused, looking at his eyebrows, and he grinned.
She speared him with a frown, although only briefly, in case she hurt him for real.
“Scoundrel. No, Professor Ottersock started asking too many questions, and I needed an excuse to get away. You know that if he realized the truth about us not actually being enemies, he’d immediately fire me.
He hasn’t budged from his notion that a male and female professor being bosom friends would bring Oxford into disrepute. ”
“Well if you’re going to use a phrase like ‘bosom friends’ I can’t say I blame him,” Caleb said, then smiled again as her frown reappeared. “So when you sent me a note to meet here tonight, you weren’t planning to tell me goodbye forever? And in public, where I couldn’t make a scene?”
Amelia suppressed a laugh. “As if being in public ever deterred you from making a scene. No, I’m not planning to say goodbye. I wouldn’t leave Oxford.” She paused for the slightest of moments, then added, “My aunt Mary would get too lonely.”
“Ah yes, poor Aunt Mary, with only her husband, your brother, your cousin, his wife, and your parents for company.” He chuckled, and a dozen heads in the crowd whipped around to see what was happening and whether it signaled an imminent explosion.
“You are a pest!” Amelia declared at once in a strident voice.
Caleb straightened, shaking back his hair. “And you are poison!”
Murmuring, the crowd turned away again. Amelia and Caleb exchanged a look that mingled amusement, exasperation, and old remembrances—the kind of look only possible when you have known someone most of your life.
No, Amelia corrected herself, “known” skimped on the truth.
She didn’t just know Caleb. He was deep inside her heart, the truest friend she’d ever had, her most favorite person in all the world.
He was not supposed to be. Society, faced with the minefield of co-ed schools, tolerated the opposite sexes being friends only so long as they never touched, never went anywhere alone together, and never progressed beyond the most polite of conversations.
Because of that, she and Caleb had, since adolescence, kept the richness of their friendship scrupulously hidden behind a facade of “just chums.” But one slip had been all it took…
one hug in a supposedly empty lane…to ruin everything.
When Throckmorton went on his gossipmongering spree, their academic peers (generally speaking, a group of bookish old men who themselves had never been hugged, except that one time Mama was a bit drunk and feeling sentimental), were immediately ready with charges of seduction!
misconduct! and making everyone else feel all hot and bothered!
Only a show of outright enmity had been able to stop the virulent rumors and ensure Amelia kept her reputation and her job, and Caleb kept his lifestyle as a wild, carefree bachelor (which mostly involved sleeping in late and adding bacon to every meal).
They’d become rather good at it; indeed, Caleb seemed to be having so much fun coming up with novel insults for her that Amelia didn’t quite know whether to be entertained or offended.
And the madcap scheme was actually working.
Professor Ottersock complained daily about their antagonism, but he never guessed that Amelia and Caleb might be doing worse things than arguing; i.e.
, lounging next to each other on a sofa, drinking tea, and discussing their favorite types of biscuit.
Amelia could only suppose that society’s fear of men and women being close friends originated with historical events, such as when Isabella of France chummied up to Roger Mortimer and together they invaded England, overthrowing the king, her husband.
Otherwise, the whole nonsense was beyond her.
Fortunately, she was an antiquarian, not a psychiatrist, because she found people utterly inexplicable.
Caleb leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the table, ankles crossed. Amelia stiffened, imagining the germs that were no doubt leaping from his shoes to populate her books. “What are you writing?” he asked.
“My speech for the symposium tomorrow.”
“Is it about the amazing treasure you found in Hereford Cathedral?”
She raised an eyebrow. “How do you know I found anything?”
“Because I know you.”
All of a sudden Amelia’s interior twinkled, as if her cells had turned to stars.
“It’s just a trinket, nothing important,” she said.
(It was extraordinary.) “Not even worth discussing.” (If she didn’t win this year’s Petrarch Award for Excellence in Historical Research, King Henry VIII was an exemplary husband.)
“Can I see it?” Caleb craned his head as if he might be able to read her notes from a distance, upside down.
Amelia laid a hand over the page. It contained a rough draft, and not even Caleb was allowed to see her grammatical errors. “You’ll learn about it tomorrow.”
Caleb’s eyes widened with genuine astonishment. “You don’t think I’m actually going to attend the symposium? Good God, there’s nothing more tedious than listening to a gaggle of historians droning on.”
“You’re a historian.”
“I’m an antiquarian. Haven’t you heard, that’s—”
“Entirely different,” they chorused, and shared a brief, sardonic smile—then hastily erased it in case anyone was watching. “So…” Caleb said, rocking his feet side to side. “Does your treasure do anything interesting? Would it turn Ottersock into a frog? Please say yes.”
“Caleb,” she murmured chidingly.
“Sorry,” he lied. “Come on, bella luna, show me.”
Amelia drew breath to chide him for using the nickname, which he’d come up with years ago in a moment of random poeticism and which she’d never been able to talk him out of.
It was a very pretty endearment—just not when used in a room full of their colleagues.
Then she froze, noticing a nearby historian straining to overhear them.
It was Dummersby from the British Museum, second only to Professor Throckmorton as academia’s worst tattler. Immediately she glared at Caleb.
“Do not even think about touching that teaspoon!”
She flicked her gaze meaningfully toward Dummersby, and in a flash Caleb’s feet were down and he was leaning forward, snatching her teaspoon from where it had been lying on a napkin beside her cup.
“Stop!” Amelia commanded, but he was already leaning back in the chair again.
“This?” he said, staring incredulously at the teaspoon. “This is your amazing treasure? Really? What does it do, turn tea into wine?”
Well, really! Even though they were pretending, Amelia felt a stab of offense.
Getting to her feet, she rounded the table with a determination she’d learned from studying Queen Isabella, the She-Wolf of France.
Caleb stood, his chair scraping against the floor, his grin twisting into a wary grimace.
“You are an unprincipled miscreant,” Amelia told him.
“Mm-hm,” he agreed, nodding.
“Give. It. Back.”
He held out the teaspoon. “Show me what it does. I dare you.”
“Oh well, if you dare me,” Amelia retorted sarcastically.
She did not reach for the teaspoon—she’d known him far too long to fall for a trap like that—and he stepped forward, coming so close she could see the flecks of gold in his eyes.
The other historians had begun setting down their drinks, stuffing canapes into their pockets, and edging for the door, but Amelia didn’t notice.
Caleb’s gaze was intense in its focus. He’d changed his brand of cologne while she’d been away, and the woodsy freshness infused her breath like a summer’s morning.
The warmth of his smile pressed against her lips, although they weren’t touching.
“I double dare you,” he said, his voice deep and shadowy.
Little flutters of sensation went through Amelia’s stomach.
I must have bound my corset too tight, she thought.
After all, she wouldn’t flutter for Caleb.
Their relationship was entirely platonic, their touches innocent—for example, when she brushed a crumb from his sleeve, beneath which his arms had grown so muscular over the years; or when he reached for one of the ginger candies she kept in her skirt pocket and accidentally stroked her thigh through layers of cotton and lace…
“Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?” Beaulieu asked, fanning himself.
We’re only friends, Amelia reiterated to herself. Friends who were fake hating to protect her reputation.
Flutter flutter, her stomach replied.
She glowered even more fiercely at Caleb, and he glowered right back. “Someone go fetch the building’s fire warden, hurry!” a professor exhorted in a loud whisper.
Without taking his eyes off her, Caleb lifted the teaspoon and drew the tip of his tongue slowly up it.
Alarmed that her evidently shrinking corset might crush her, Amelia snatched the spoon from him. “For heaven’s sake,” she grumbled. “This is a very sensitive and dangerous item.”
“It tastes like sugar,” he said. “You stirred your tea with it.” He cocked his head, smiling with fascination at her, and Amelia flushed, imagining him smiling like that before he kissed a woman.
“It’s thaumaturgic silver,” she said. “In the Siege of Hereford during the civil war, a vicar hid it inside the cathedral’s crypt, to be used as a final defense should the building be stormed. He left a vague mention of this in his journal, which I deciphered.”
“Okay,” Caleb said, still smiling.
The teaspoon began to feel warm in Amelia’s hand as she clutched it even tighter. “It’s magical.”
“Prove it.”
Nearby, a lamp crackled.
“Please,” he added, fluttering his eyelashes. And while Amelia was trying to decide whether he’d darkened them with cosmetics, he reached out to grab the teaspoon again. She automatically slapped his hand away. He slapped hers back.
At which point, both remembered they were standing in full view of their peers, and proceeded to act accordingly.
In other words, a hand-slapping match broke out. Within seconds the teaspoon dropped to the floor, ignored.
“Ruffian!” Amelia exclaimed.
“Pernickitator,” Caleb retorted.
“That’s not a real word!”
“See what I mean?”
Tiny blue flames of magic began to flicker along the spoon’s handle. In response, books tumbled from shelves, and the lamp’s glass shade melted.
“You are outrageous!” Amelia declared. She almost skidded on the teaspoon, and Caleb caught her by one elbow to steady her. “You are obnoxious!” she added, pulling from his grip. “You are overly opinionated!”
“And you’ve clearly spent ages consulting a thesaurus to describe me.
It’s highly suggestive.” He raised his eyebrows, but when Amelia lowered hers in a frown, he retreated.
In doing so, he accidentally kicked the teaspoon.
It went skittering across the floor, trailing sparks and making historians leap from its path.
“Being suggestive is the purpose of a thesaurus,” Amelia said.
“You should try poetry instead.”
The teaspoon clattered. Sausage rolls began levitating off the buffet table.
“You are a beetle-headed, flap-ear’d knave!” Amelia shouted, driven to the Shakespearean level of insults.
Thud thud thud. More books fell off their shelves or flew across the room, pages flapping, to slam against a wall. Historians ducked behind armchairs or cowered beneath desks. Beaulieu emitted a high-pitched scream and fainted into Dummersby’s arms.
“Better that than a stinging wasp!” Caleb retorted.
Amelia blasted him with her fiercest stare, the one she usually reserved for students who claimed three grandmothers’ funerals in one year.
The usual pretense at enmity was escalating out of control, just as it had in the Ashmolean when a curator came upon them standing close together while they inspected the candlestick.
She could not understand why, any more than she could stop it.
Arguing with Caleb was beginning to have the same effect on her that the divine right of kings had on England’s Parliament, and she couldn’t seem to restore her calm head.
Suddenly the teaspoon leaped up, spinning as if it were stirring the air.
Flares of blue light and fire burst from it.
The historians began to shout and push one another as they made a dash for the exit.
Finally noticing, Amelia turned to stare at the spoon with trepidation. Beside her, Caleb did the same.
“What’s its power?” he asked from the side of his mouth.
“Intense combustion in response to environmental discord,” Amelia said.
They glanced at each other with a silent oh, damn…
—
As the explosion boomed through the Minervaeum, its staff sighed wearily and went to fetch the ever-present water buckets.