Chapter Ten
The sands of time are constantly getting
into people’s underwear.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
At first, Amelia tried to ignore the ghost. This was a rather strange tactic considering, as a historian, she knew perfectly well ignoring King John of England while he was alive had done no one any good, and was unlikely to do so now that he was inexplicably haunting her bedroom.
And indeed, with every move she made—packing away the enchanted saltcellar, taking off her shoes and stockings, plucking swan feathers from her hair—he shouted “Merde!” and waved his sword with a dangerous majesty.
Whether the king was swearing at someone in his memory or reexperiencing his death from dysentery, considering merde’s scatological translation, Amelia knew not and cared less.
She was in the process of hunting down whatever antique was responsible for his apparition when servants appeared with hot water to fill the copper tub in one corner of the bedroom.
“Thank you,” Amelia said, watching them walk through the Plantagenet king’s specter without blinking. “I say, do you feel a chill or anything unusual?” she asked the young housemaid who laid a tray of food on the bedside table.
“No, miss,” the girl replied with the extreme politeness of someone whose workday had started fifteen hours ago and who suspected Amelia was now going to have her haul up firewood and set a fire in the hearth.
“Hm, interesting,” Amelia murmured. No doubt her own awareness of the supernatural activity was due to a superior—
“Unless you mean the ghost,” the girl added before Amelia’s ego embarrassed itself further. “The house is jam-packed with ’em. They even wander the hills, begging to be let inside. You get used to it after a while.”
There really must be a fey line here if the ghosts are outdoors too, Amelia mused.
She smiled absentmindedly at the maid, who responded with a direct look, such as the footman had employed earlier.
Amelia felt herself thus convinced to tip the girl a penny.
Then the two servants who’d brought the water also required the same, and after they all departed she could only be glad she’d not asked for someone to make up the hearth fire, considering what it might have cost.
She bathed rather hurriedly in her chemise, since although King John had died six hundred and seventy-five years ago, she still didn’t want him ogling her.
She set Caleb’s jacket to soak. Then, dressed in a white cotton nightgown, she sat on the bed, drying her hair and eating a cold supper while the ghost ranted.
Rest was impossible under the circumstances; instead, she brought out her assignment journal to document the evening’s magical events.
But even in King John’s quieter moments, rain beat vehemently against the windows, flashing now and again with lightning, and drafts whined beneath the door, making the lantern’s light flicker. How am I supposed to focus on academia in such a dark ambience? Amelia thought irritably.
“Sometimes history ought to remain secret,” she snapped at the ghost.
“Tu sens comme une latrine sale!” he replied, shaking his sword yet again.
Being informed that she stank like a dirty toilet was the final straw.
Logically, she understood King John could not in fact smell her.
Emotionally, she’d had enough. Taking up the lantern and the biography of Mary Wollstonecraft she’d not yet been able to read, she left her bedroom, crossing the dark, cold hall to scratch against Caleb’s door.
The floorboards groaned beneath her bare feet, as if to mourn this decision.
The night beyond her lantern’s light watched her with malice.
She thought that she heard hushed voices, and paused, heart in her throat…
but it must have been the draft that was stirring her nightgown’s hem, even if it sounded eerily like women talking inside the walls.
“Caleb,” she whispered as loudly as she dared, considering that Throckmorton was accommodated nearby and that she, dressed only in a nightgown, with not a scrap of professorial tweed anywhere about her, was barely decent.
Knocking on the door was out of the question, lest a servant suddenly appear to open it in return for a cash reward.
And trying to send a message through the psychic power of thought achieved no success beyond mortifying her intelligence. “Caleb,” she whispered once more.
Finally, the door creaked ajar. Caleb peered out through a narrow gap, his hair tousled, his face spectral in the lantern’s light.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I thought you were a—”
“Ghost?”
“Vampire bat,” he corrected her, and she laughed. Immediately pressing her lips together to curtail the sound, she gave him a wide-eyed, incredulous look.
“Vampire bat,” she repeated in a whisper. “They don’t even live in the UK.”
“You’d know that they do if you’d read even one penny dreadful novel.” He took her arm and pulled her into the dimly lit room, closing the door behind her.
“Caleb!” she protested. She’d wanted to get into his bedroom, but she’d not imagined manhandling would be involved. (At least, that was her story, and she was sticking to it.)
“You don’t want to be seen skulking outside my door,” he said. “What’s up?”
The question entered Amelia’s brain and promptly cowered in fright as it was met by a barrage of thoughts all shouting at once, for Caleb was clad in nothing more than a pair of long underpants.
They clung so tightly to his thighs, Amelia would have dropped the lantern except that one part of her brain was steadier than the rest and had absolutely no intention of depriving her of that light source.
Trying to be a proper lady and respectful friend, she directed her vision toward Caleb’s face.
But it was impossible not to be drawn back to his well-honed nakedness, and she found herself almost going cross-eyed with the effort to both look and not look.
His crescent moon tattoo seemed to smirk knowingly at her.
“I—I—uh—” She blushed as equanimity failed her.
And Caleb, who himself was not the blushing kind…
unless you counted how he made others redden, be it from coyness (undergraduate students), desire (women—and a few men), or blustering outrage (Professor Ottersock)…
made no effort to remedy the situation. Clearly he was aware of her reaction to his body, and he didn’t dislike it.
I dare you to say what you’re really thinking, his shadowed gaze urged.
But Amelia knew she could not play this game with Caleb.
He would absolutely win, and she didn’t think either of them was prepared for the consequences of that.
They’d almost lost their jobs because of a single hug.
She’d almost lost her entire wherewithal because of the kiss in Staveley.
Pulling herself together, she lifted her chin and looked him steadily in the eye.
Or at least tried to. But she discovered with a shock that his own gaze had slipped down to her nightgown, and suddenly she apprehended that its thin cotton was less protective than it had seemed in the privacy of her own bedroom.
She resisted an urge to flee hysterically…
become a nun!…throw all caution to the wind and kiss the man cross an arm over her bosom.
No one had seen beneath her clothing since she was nineteen, when James Bowfooter got her bodice almost entirely off before good sense reasserted itself in the nick of time.
She wasn’t prudish, per se; she was simply like all other girls in nineteenth-century England: aware of the dangerous limitations to contraceptive practices.
The thought of those practices took what remained of her inherent tranquility and threw it violently into a storm of frazzlement. “King!” she blurted.
Caleb’s eyebrows sauntered up. “Really, ‘Professor’ is adequate.”
Amelia was rolling her eyes even before her brain caught up with her.
When it did, thankfully it brought a restoration of rationality.
So Caleb was mostly undressed? Uninteresting.
So he was a more intriguing specimen of manhood than she had imagined?
Irrelevant. So she wanted to pull down his long johns and gain a full appreciation of that manhood?
Oh my God, Mother Mary, and all the saints.
As thunder shook the blustering night outside and shadows caressed Caleb’s torso, Amelia’s good sense vanished once again, forcing her to seek desperate refuge in religion.
“I thought you were supposed to be resting,” Caleb said, looking stern.
“Ghost,” she said. “King John. Can’t sleep.” She sounded like Throckmorton, but it could not be helped. Any use of a pronoun might just spin her into an overwhelming jumble of me, you, us…
Caleb did not immediately answer. His gaze became analytical, as if she were an ancient text he needed to translate.
Then he took pity on her, and reaching out to a shirt tossed over a nearby chair, he put it on.
This did not exactly help matters, however, since the sight of his long fingers working the buttons created a swirl of hot sensation deep in Amelia’s stomach.
“Do you want to sleep in here tonight?” he asked.
Amelia nodded. Then frowned confusedly, shaking her head. This was not going as she expected. It hadn’t occurred to her that not only might Caleb be undressed for sleeping but that she’d be such a fluttery idiot. “No,” she said, “I shouldn’t.”
“No one would know. We’ll bar the door and make sure you’re back to your room first thing in the morning.”