Chapter Two #2
“But—” Amelia also said, as several essays transformed into large moths that began flapping wildly, emitting blue sparks.
“Silence!” Ottersock roared. “The pair of you are leaving!”
At once, their attention snapped to him. “Leaving?” they chorused.
“Are you firing us?” Amelia added, her face blanching.
Even Caleb felt disturbed. He’d spent his entire life aiming to become an Oxford professor.
Without the job, he didn’t know who he might become, but memories of grimy streets, thin gruel, and his father’s death from cholera still haunted him with what he might have been.
Ottersock snatched up the jar of willow bark and began shaking powder directly into his cupped palm. “I’m not firing you. Yet. I’m sending you to the countryside.”
“The what?” Aghast, Caleb was sure he must have misheard. A large moth landed atop Ottersock’s head, but damned if he was going to say anything about it. Even Amelia remained silent, her brain no doubt stuck at the “yet” part of the conversation.
“Countryside,” Ottersock repeated. “The big green place with lots of trees and hardly any students.”
Caleb and Amelia looked at each other, wide-eyed, a silent conversation whipping back and forth between them. Then realizing that Ottersock was watching with roused suspicion, Caleb immediately frowned. “This is all your fault!” he grumbled at Amelia.
She gasped with credible outrage in reply. “Mine? If you weren’t such a—a rapscallion—”
“Ooh,” he gibed. “Never have I been so insulted.”
Her eyes flashed. On the desk, the Hereford teaspoon began to tremble.
“Ahem.” Ottersock cleared his throat with such vehemence, he must have strained his tonsils. “Can’t you two stop with the enmity for just one hour?”
They murmured apologies. Ottersock tipped his handful of headache powder into his mouth, swallowing it unhappily. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he scowled at the door behind them. “You can come in now, Miss Tunnicliffe.”
Caleb and Amelia looked back to see a young woman enter the office. She was attractively plump, with her black hair in a fashionably tall knot, and she wore a striped dress suit that didn’t just say I mean business but practically gave a podium speech about it.
“Professor,” she greeted Ottersock. “Professor, Professor,” she added, nodding to Caleb and Amelia.
Her tone was crisp, and yet the tightness with which her lace-gloved fingers clutched her reticule suggested nervous excitement behind the poise.
She glanced at the moths and the fire-breathing statue, and her eyes widened.
“This is Miss Vanity Tunnicliffe,” Ottersock introduced her. “She is a curator from the British Museum, and has a job for you.”
“Actually, I’m just a receptionist,” Miss Tunnicliffe said bashfully. “All the museum’s curators were at the Minervaeum Club when some dreadful person let off a magic bomb. They’re in various states of enchantment, so I was dispatched instead.”
Ottersock’s jaw twitched. Amelia stepped forward hastily, holding out her hand to the young woman in polite welcome.
“How do you do, Miss Tunnicliffe?”
“I am very well, Professor Tarrant,” Miss Tunnicliffe replied, shaking the hand daintily. She spoke like a woman who wielded the Queen’s English in the same conscious manner one wore an especially fashionable hat. “And you?”
Caleb rolled his eyes. They’d be here all day at this rate, and he had important work to enjoy ignoring. “What’s this about?” he interrupted.
Miss Tunnicliffe turned to him, her expression brightening as she took in his remarkably good looks (or so Caleb assumed, disregarding the influence of the lamp behind him). “Professor Sterling, it’s an honor. I attended your talk on the Big Bang last year.”
Well perhaps they could spare a few minutes for small talk. “Ah yes, the explosion of Alfred the Great’s statue in Southwark,” he said, smiling with instinctive flirtatiousness. “I hope you found it interesting.”
“Oh, yes, it was stellar!” Miss Tunnicliffe very nearly tittered but caught herself in time.
“I’m here because Sir Nigel Harroway, a private collector of antiques, is donating a substantial portion of that collection to the British Museum.
He suspects several of the items are made from thaumaturgic materials, so the museum requests that Oxford University loan us some specialists who can identify and organize the items before they’re transported. ”
“Nobody is more specialist than us,” Caleb assured her with a grin.
“Nobody is more annoying than you,” Ottersock muttered. Miss Tunnicliffe glanced at him uncertainly, and he huffed in weary resignation. “They’re really very good,” he conceded.
“The senior curator did recommend Professor Glebe from Cambridge University—”
“No, no!” Ottersock held up his hands as if he could physically repel that very idea.
“Tarrant and Sterling are the best. You want to take them, honestly. And keep them for as long as you wish. I promise they’ll do excellent work!
” He gave Caleb and Amelia a warning stare.
“Not even these two can get into trouble in Cumbria.”
“Cumbria?!” Caleb echoed in horror.
“But—but—” Amelia was apparently too dazed to form a proper sentence.
“But it’s rural,” Caleb supplied, unable to repress a shiver.
“And hours away,” Amelia added.
“And rural,” Caleb repeated, justifiably so.
Ottersock frowned with bewilderment. “How did you not realize ‘the countryside’ would be rural?”
“I assumed you were talking about somewhere like Greenwich. I can’t go to Cumbria. I’m a great indoorsman; too much fresh air upsets my digestive system.”
“Besides, term starts in a few days,” Amelia said. “I have lectures to present.”
“Me too,” Caleb said, although in fact his plan for this term’s lectures currently involved presenting a table clock that wasn’t actually an antique, he just hoped his students would fix it for him, and taking a field trip to Jabbercoffee café to “study its old windows” while he drank a cappuccino.
“Pish!” Ottersock interjected. “Associate Professor Capping will take over both your lecture schedules. She can easily do so in addition to presenting her own lectures, holding tutorials, providing pastoral care to students, keeping up with her administrative duties, and captaining our faculty badminton team.”
“Be reasonable, man,” Caleb urged. “It’s far too much to put on anyone, expecting them to go to Cumbria.”
But Ottersock had long ago sacrificed being reasonable on the altar of faculty management.
“It’s decided, Sterling.” He jammed the lid on the willow-bark jar like an exhausted student putting a full stop at the end of a dissertation.
“Miss Tunnicliffe will accompany you to the Harroways’ estate in her capacity as a…
well, a receptionist, I suppose…and as a chaperone, since obviously a man cannot travel with a woman to whom he’s not married. ”
“But traveling with two of them is acceptable?” Caleb asked wryly.
Ottersock ignored that. “Go home. Pack your bags. You leave today, eleven o’clock sharp!”
This dramatic announcement inspired a moment of stunned silence. (That is, apart from the papery rustle of the moth that was industriously spinning a cocoon in his hair.) Then Amelia said, “That gives us only an hour to prepare.”
“And leave how?” Caleb asked suspiciously. Knowing Oxford University’s approach to budgeting, he expected to be walking part of the distance.
“I’m supposed to be attending a family dinner this weekend,” Amelia said.
“I don’t have suitable shoes for the countryside,” Caleb added.
Ottersock exhaled forcefully. The willow bark was causing his pupils to constrict, but this did not prevent him from scowling at both professors.
“Your train departs at eleven o’clock. On—” He jabbed the desktop with his pointer finger.
“The—” Jab. “Dot.” Jab. “Be on it or your jobs will be history!”
“Er…” Caleb said. “Strictly speaking, our jobs already are hist—”
“Go! Now!”
Being as they were not complete idiots, they went.
—
As Amelia emerged from Ottersock’s office into Balliol’s Garden Quadrangle, she angled a hand over her eyes, shielding them against the morning light and hiding her frown.
Cumbria! In autumn! With barely any warning!
For an undetermined period of time! Just as term was beginning!
And various other concerns that were comparatively minor but nevertheless also warranted exclamation marks!
Never before had she been so frazzled—and that was saying something, considering her job involved such things as time-warping clocks, ghost swarms, and undergraduate students.
She faced catastrophe on a weekly basis.
Usually a bit of glue fixed it. But there was no fixing this.
Once again, Ottersock had overturned her life.
I should have accepted that offer from Heidelberg University, she told herself dourly, ignoring the fact that not only could she barely speak a word of German, but her mother had threatened to suffer a nervous collapse should she move to “that backwater”—i.e.
, Europe. And yet, she really couldn’t bear to leave Caleb, who’d been her dearest friend since their early days at boarding school, when he found her crying in the dank shadows behind the dormitory and told her jokes until she laughed.
The idea of life without him was a bleak one, and made the sacrifice of her gentility for their fake-hating scheme worthwhile. Albeit only just.