Chapter Seven #2
Amelia held up a small copper device that appeared in all aspects to be a compass.
It was, however, a thaumometer, a specialist gauge designed to measure the degree of magical energy within a room.
While not as powerful as the version used by geographers, it nevertheless excelled in capturing delicate spectral vibrations.
Caleb watched its tiny needle tremble near the height of its range.
He found himself distracted, however, by the sight of Amelia watching it.
She was pale-faced, shadow-eyed, and now completely dispossessed of hair clips.
Caleb hadn’t seen her hair down in years and was oddly enthralled by the fact that it wasn’t as long as he’d imagined, falling like dark silk to not quite halfway down her back.
With unusual self-restraint, he did not reach out to caress it.
“So let me get this right,” he said. “The moment you entered your room, with wet clothes, soaked shoes, and on the verge of hypothermia, you got straight to work.”
“No,” she corrected him calmly. “I tipped the footman and waited until he left. And then I got to work. It’s important to acquire a base-level reading of conjures before the space becomes disturbed.”
Amused by such adorable prudence, Caleb set one arm up against the doorframe and leaned in closer. “You are incorrigible,” he told her. And if his voice was low, a little husky, this was merely due to the cold weather.
“Nonsense,” Amelia replied briskly. “I am professional. Several medieval coins are framed on the wall, and I suspect one of them is expressing its thaumaturgic energy in a spectral form. Do you think they’d miss me if I absented myself from dinner? I want to investigate this further.”
“Yes, they’d miss you,” he said, although he doubted this was true. He would miss her, however, and that justified the lie.
“You could tell them I was tired after our journey.” She was back to watching the thaumometer, and if its gauge hadn’t been so clearly active, Caleb would have suspected her of merely trying to get out of socializing.
Dinner parties were to Amelia what being stretched on the rack was to Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary Tudor: a constant threat in the background of life, promising misery.
“Meely,” he said, trying to regain her attention, and when that didn’t work he set a finger and thumb beneath her chin, tilting it up gently so that she saw him instead of ghosts in her machine.
She blinked in surprise, her gorgeous lashes sweeping down, then fluttering slightly as they rose again.
Gratification sparked deep in Caleb’s body as he realized he’d put her just a little into disarray.
Not so much that she slipped out of herself and became unhappy, which would have made him unhappy too, but just enough to be like the gentlest kiss on her wrist—an act he’d never dare to attempt in reality, although suddenly, quite desperately, he wished that he would.
The thought alarmed him. Amelia was the calm center of his life.
His best friend. Romantic attraction would imperil that friendship (since of course she wouldn’t feel the same), and Caleb’s pulse thundered at the very idea.
Releasing her chin, he let his hand fall to his side, where its fingers stretched and curled as something like magic tingled within them.
“What are we going to do?” he asked, although it felt futile.
“Well, to begin with,” Amelia said sedately (although her eyes were doing that coppery-gleaming thing they always did whenever she felt stirred by some secret emotion), “we are going to track the occult signature. Then upon locating its—”
“I mean,” Caleb interrupted, “what are we going to do about Throckmorton being here?”
It wasn’t really what he’d meant, but he was willing to deceive them both.
“The same as we’ve been doing for the past five months,” Amelia answered. “Pretend enmity.”
Caleb crooked the arm propped against the doorframe so he could rub his thumb knuckle against his brow. “Bloody hell, this is exhausting. Can’t we just lock him in the attic for the duration?”
Humor tugged fleetingly at one corner of Amelia’s mouth. But she countered it with a gently stern frown, such as Caleb had seen her direct at her brother often enough. Because, of course, that’s what he himself was to her—a kind of brother.
“Goodness, what a pitiful sigh,” she remarked.
“Don’t worry, Professor Throckmorton is unlikely to stay for long once he finds out this house doesn’t even have gas lighting.
Now, you should go and dress for dinner.
” She tapped the thaumometer against his chest. “You worry about me getting sick, but you’re just as wet. ”
That was true. He was a drippy mess. And as he looked at her now, and looked, and could not seem to stop looking, he felt himself melting even more. So he pushed himself away from the doorframe with a wry grin. “Very well. As you wish. Prepare to be dazzled.”
Amelia rolled her eyes. She closed the door, but before it clicked into place she abruptly opened it again. Caleb’s heart staggered, hoping for—what exactly, he did not understand. Just hoping, longing.
“Remember,” she admonished. “We hate each other.”
“Absol—” he began.
But she’d already shut the door.
—
Thunder shook the last light from the sky, and the shadows in Ravenscroft Manor crept down from the ceiling beams to swarm through its halls, whispering with cold drafts.
Amelia stood quietly within them, staring at a bone white shaft of light that fell through the half-open door of the dining chamber.
She would never admit to fear, but a substantial amount of trepidation certainly gripped her heart.
A few years ago, she had traveled to Paris and the Musée de l’Histoire de France to make a presentation about a singing hat believed to have belonged to Napoléon.
The audience of two hundred gentlemen historians smirked as she walked onto the stage, patently anticipating that she’d prove women had no place in academia.
Upon arriving at the lectern, she discovered that, instead of her lecture notes, she’d accidentally brought a letter from her mother advising her to pluck her eyebrows and wear a tighter corset. It had been a chilling moment.
This one was worse.
From the other side of the door came the sounds of women laughing, interspersed with jocular booms from Professor Throckmorton.
They might as well have been the sounds of guns and cannons.
Amelia never quailed from lecturing groups of people, but making small talk with them was a whole different matter.
It felt rather akin to having conquered half of France but not knowing how to manage one’s own turbulent archbishop.
At least with that presentation for the singing hat she’d been able to call upon her well-trained memory and thus proceed in a state of such calm grace that the audience found themselves both thoroughly educated and terrified by her intelligence.
Here, now, however, she had no skills to summon.
It wasn’t that she was antisocial. It was just that she had a dislike for society. Growing up in a boarding school tended to do that to a person.
“Excuse me,” came a meek little voice, and Amelia turned to find a gentleman standing beside her.
Short and rather scrawny, wearing a brown jacket that had seen better centuries, he looked rather like an accountant that had taken a wrong turn in Manchester and somehow ended up in the damp, windswept farmlands of east Cumbria.
As he peered up at Amelia through small, round spectacles, he gave her a sympathetic smile.
“Don’t want to go in?” he asked, twitching a finger toward the dining room’s door. His voice was paper-thin and the finger trembled slightly, as if he were barely holding on to this present moment, although he couldn’t have been more than sixty.
“Oh,” Amelia said, a little startled by such a frank inquiry. “Just taking a deep breath first.”
The man nodded. “I have to do that too.” He leaned a little closer to confide, “I don’t know why I was summoned to this; usually I’m not required to come down. Honestly, I’d rather be left alone to my work.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. It’s very nice to meet you.”
He appeared surprised by this basic courtesy. “How kind! I hear they’ve brought antiquarians up from Oxford. Are you one of them?”
“Yes.” She held out a hand. “Amelia Tarr—”
Suddenly a sharp voice flew out of the dining room, slicing through their conversation. “Nigel!”
The gentleman flinched. “See you in there,” he said rather grimly, taking Amelia’s hand and patting it with flimsy encouragement before hurrying away into the room. Amelia blinked at his departing figure, bemused.
That was Sir Nigel? She’d been expecting someone more…more.
“Hello there.”
Encompassed by cologne and a sense of comfort, Amelia did not need to look around to know Caleb had arrived. As he came to stand alongside her, he tapped her arm with the back of his hand. “I see you’re late again.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You really ought not say that when you arrive after me.”
“Oh, but I’m fashionably late,” he answered with a grin, tugging on the satin lapels of his dinner jacket.
Indeed, he looked insanely handsome, his blond hair swept back in a style that made its dampness seem a deliberate choice all the boys would soon be copying, whereas Amelia’s own hair, pulled into a bun, was merely, hopelessly wet.
There existed no sign that he’d endured a long day of travel, rambunctious magic, and miserable childhood memories involving horse dung, to say nothing of the kissing (which Amelia could only hope he didn’t rank as equal with the dung).
Of course, his smart clothes and soft pink eye shadow helped, but mostly it was just Caleb and his exquisite genes.
Amelia didn’t know whether to be jealous or in love.
Well, not in love, but…but…
Thankfully, at that moment she noticed his bow tie was slightly askew.
Unable to resist the lure to tidy it, she set her hands on his arms and turned him toward her.
“Really, at your age you should be able to arrange your neckwear properly,” she grumbled as she straightened the offending bow.
Caleb glanced at the dining room door, but Amelia had already ensured no one could see them.
(Two footmen stood nearby, watching the whole scene avidly, but they did not count.)
“Perhaps I leave it crooked just to give you the pleasure of fixing it,” he said smilingly.
Tingles danced in Amelia’s stomach. She wished she wasn’t intelligent and sensible, so that she might pretend they were caused by some digestive ailment, rather than by hearing Caleb’s husky voice speak the words to give you pleasure.
She could feel him looking down at her and she stared determinedly at the tie, which she’d somehow rearranged to a state even more askew than before.
Biting her lip, focusing on the little pain, she got the bow straight and stepped back.
Caleb stepped with her. He caught her hand, which was a good thing since Amelia felt alarmingly off-balance.
His smile was wicked, but in his eyes she could see sympathy.
He, of course, understood her hesitation at the threshold.
He’d had to prod or cajole or sometimes half drag her into faculty parties and award ceremony dinners more often than she cared to remember.
“Come on, bella luna,” he said. “Let’s go meet the enemy together. ”
The words snapped her back into good sense. Tugging her hand free, she frowned at him. “I do not require assistance from an adversary such as you, Professor Sterling,” she said pointedly.
“Oops,” he answered, and leaning close, he whispered, “Sorry. Looking at you in your evening attire, I completely forgot I’m supposed to hate you.” And he slid a wry gaze down her white-collared but otherwise simple black dress and gray cardigan.
Well, really! How rude! And outrageous! And oddly thrilling!
Feeling herself on a shoreline with a great red tidal wave of blushing heading rapidly her way, Amelia lifted her chin, threw Caleb a vicious glare, then marched into the dining room.
As she did so, she caught the flash of a smile on his face and realized that he’d played her so she would forget her nerves.
Charmed, she felt herself begin to smile also.
And then she looked around the room, and the smile collapsed as her mouth fell ajar in astonishment.