Chapter Twelve #3
“You’re headed in the wrong direction, I’m afraid.
That’s my bedroom along there. The stairs are back that way.
” As she gestured in their direction, she saw an expression on Vanity’s face that was so odd, so fleeting, she could not identify it.
Her instincts twitched, however. Glancing along the corridor, she remembered that hers wasn’t the only bedroom in it.
Oh dear.
“Perhaps you should return to your room,” she told the girl kindly. “If you use the bellpull, a servant will attend to you.”
Vanity nodded far more vigorously than the suggestion warranted. “Excellent idea, Professor,” she said, and dashed away.
Amelia sighed as she watched the girl flee. She couldn’t blame her for being attracted to Caleb, but on the other hand was not about to encourage it. Caleb was hers. Platonically speaking, of course.
As in Plato’s theory of each person having another half, a soulmate.
As in, just friends.
Friends who would have been making good inroads into being less two halves and more one beast with two backs, were there any justice in the world.
On that sober note, Amelia returned to her bed, wrapped a pillow around her head to block out King John’s rantings, and delved into The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It oddly enough proved less entertaining than kissing a handsome, half-naked man, but did have one benefit—it put her to sleep, even if only for a few hours before a pallid sun rose through the murk like a ghost and the week’s history began repeating itself again.
—
By Thursday, she’d grown frazzled to the extent that her parents, had they seen it, would have disowned her on the spot.
She’d also developed a headache from the excessive thaumaturgic energy emitting from so many antiques.
(Antiquarians disdained the use of protective equipment, considering it something only “those lunatics in the geography department” needed.) She’d even begun gazing out of windows at the gloomy landscape and sighing forlornly, like a woman in a gothic novel.
But matters reached a crisis point over luncheon that Thursday, when she placed jam before clotted cream on her scone.
Upon realizing her error, Amelia reached rather urgently for tea to quell the emotion rising in her throat that just might become a scream.
But she stopped, hand suspended in midair, as she noticed Caleb watching her.
His eyes were shadowed with concern, and flutters immediately began to dance in her stomach (with scarves, tambourines, and flaming headdresses) as she gazed back at him.
Every inch of her skin ached from the deprivation of his casual touch.
Never mind erotic possibilities; she missed her chum.
Every instinct wanted to smile at him, smooth his hair, and give him a ginger candy that would taste like comfort in his mouth.
Just then, she became aware that the company had fallen into a silence that veritably trembled with fascination. Everyone watched her watch Caleb watching her. It felt as dizzying as it sounded. Luckily, Caleb recognized it too in that moment, and he smirked.
“I didn’t take you for having Devonshire manners, Professor Tarrant,” he said with a languid disdain that seemed to come worryingly easy to him these days.
“Understandable, since you yourself have no manners at all,” Amelia snapped back.
Her ire was only partly fake—for the dratted man bore a tiny smear of cream on his upper lip, and he licked it away slowly, purposefully, all the while still staring at her.
In that moment, Amelia hated him with a passion that threatened to see her moaning at the table, should she fail to repress it.
“You have stripped me of all civility,” Caleb retorted. His eyes flashed, his damp lip glistened in the lamplight, and at the head of the table Sir Nigel grabbed a side plate and began fanning himself with it.
“You certainly are brave, my friend!” Dummersby said to Caleb. “Not many would dare combat such a formidable lady the way you do. We at the museum call her ‘Miss Terrifying Tarrant,’ ha ha.”
Suddenly, the heat in Amelia vanished, leaving her stark white and icy, as though she stood in the pitiless storm that raged outside.
Part of her wanted to run out there now, just run and run, fleeing Dummersby’s cruelty, and Throckmorton’s silent glee as he beheld the scene, and even Vanity’s silliness.
But she couldn’t run; that would only inspire them to gossip more.
The only recourse left was to make some barbed comment and suffer the internal consequences.
The pain of injured dignity. The loss of self-respect.
She was not a belligerent woman. She was quiet, studious, always willing to help other people so long as they did not try to interrupt her reading.
Through her university student days, she’d been a veritable Jane Grey in a court of passionate Tudors.
When agreeing to fake hate Caleb, she’d not appreciated just how much doing so would require her to actually be hateful, and how much that would hurt, as if it broke something essential within herself.
As for her reputation: no one called her a trollop anymore, which was good. They called her “terrifying” instead, which was so much worse. She had to wonder: her job and her self…were they really equivalent?
And yet, Caleb. It always came down to that.
Just Caleb. If she left Oxford University to escape gossip and maybe find herself again, she’d lose him.
He might say beautiful things about crossing any ocean to be with her, but that was how he talked on a regular basis.
The fact was, he loved his job too, and he’d overcome immeasurable obstacles to secure it.
Indeed, he’d literally risen from the gutter to become a respectable professor (even if he did sometimes, in a shocking display of bad manners, eat his pudding before his main course).
Amelia would not allow him to sacrifice that success.
Which meant sacrificing herself. For who would she even be without her Caleb? Just half a woman, with the ghost of that beloved friendship wandering lost, calling out in anguish for its home.
Looking at him now across the table, she saw that he shared none of her troubled emotions.
He was relaxed, even amused, about the situation.
In his eyes was the stillness Amelia longed for.
He gave her that gift, so that for a few perfect seconds the world became nothing but the two of them, together without words.
His gaze was an embrace, gentle and unflinching, better than any kiss (although Amelia would happily take a kiss also—or perhaps several—just to be sure her comparison was accurate).
Her stress eased, and even the storm outside seemed to sigh with a wild kind of peace.
Then slowly Caleb blinked, and turning his head, he looked at Dummersby.
“Professor Terrifying Tarrant,” he corrected the man. Three simple words, a whole threatening monologue within them.
Forget fluttering. Amelia’s nether regions outright swooned, and not even the sternest good sense in her brain could revive it.
Dummersby laughed, but it was a tremulous sound, almost frightened.
“Of course. I beg your pardon, Professor Tarrant.” He spoke with a skill that so many gentlemen in middle management enjoy: being able to insult someone in the most obvious and yet wholly irreproachable manner possible.
Nastiness veritably oozed from the smile he slithered in Amelia’s direction.
All at once, her stress rushed back. Then, once certain she’d apprehended his intent, Dummersby directed that smile at Vanity.
“I’m a great supporter of lady academics, aren’t I, Miss Tunnicliffe? ”
Vanity immediately nodded, her topknot of hair juddering. “Yes, sir, you certainly are!” she answered with the enthusiasm of a woman who can see Employee of the Month in her near future.
Amelia pushed back her chair so forcefully it scraped against the floor. Ignoring the shot of pain that the awful, ill-mannered noise sent through her nerves, she stood, smiling with a frosty politeness. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Going to rest?” Dummersby asked, smugly condescending. “Quite understandable, my dear. Long days of work are hard on feminine delicacy.”
Amelia’s smile in response was so masterfully serene, it ought to have inaugurated a new annual award category: Women in Academia Restraining Themselves from Slapping Men (gold medals for any and all ladies who achieved it).
“To the contrary, Mr. Dummersby,” she said.
“I am going back to work.” The sooner they got it done, the sooner she could return to the serenity of Oxford.
Rowdy students would be a balm after the company of these people. “Enjoy your meal.”
And she swept from the room before her dignity completely shattered.
—
But the next afternoon, a miracle occurred.
Walking from the formal drawing room to the less-formal-but-still-overdecorated sitting room, reading volume two of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as she went, Amelia rounded a corner to find Caleb standing in the corridor ahead, inspecting a marble statue of Hephaestus.
She halted, he turned, and they stared at each other in silence.
They were, for the first time in days, completely alone.
Suddenly, Amelia found herself backed against a wall by almost six feet of impatient (but exquisitely perfumed) maleness before she realized what was happening.
Her book fell from numb fingers to the floor, where it narrowly missed breaking toes with its weight.
Caleb loomed over her, one hand on the wall beside her head and a dark heat beneath his long eyelashes.
His smile only failed to meet the definition of caressing because, alas, it was not actively doing so to her lips.
“Hello, Professor,” he said in a low voice.
Amelia swallowed dryly. She’d been greeted thus by hundreds of people over the years, but never before had it ignited such a reaction within her.
Indeed, she’d not have been surprised had she fallen pregnant from the words.
“Professor Sterling,” she managed to reply, her crisp manner concealing the sudden, sparkling chaos inside.
“I’ve been wanting to get you all to myself for days now,” Caleb said, his gaze moving down her body as if he saw that internal chaos and recognized something of himself in it.
“Oh?”
“You’ve been…” He leaned in to whisper against her ear. “Very naughty.”
“Nonsense.” Amelia’s vocal cords supplied this response out of sheer habit, because her brain had abruptly announced it was divorcing her, and was throwing her intelligence out the window like left-behind clothes and toiletries.
“Yes,” Caleb said. “You’ve robbed me of my—”
“Good senses,” she inserted.
“Teaspoon,” he corrected her.
Amelia blinked as her intelligence snapped back into place. “What? Nonsense. You have it. You took it from me that night in the dining room.”
“I put it in a safe bag in my suitcase,” Caleb told her, “but you’ve obviously taken it back, considering how that sauceboat erupted yesterday.” He began sliding his free hand into her skirt pocket, and she slapped it away.
“I have not,” she whispered fiercely, glancing along the corridor to be sure no one was present to witness this scene.
“Perhaps it’s in one of your pockets.” She began delving into them, even as he searched all of hers.
Their hands rummaged among each other’s clothing and brushed against each other’s limbs, and so comprehensive was this mutual searching that their breath came fast and their faces began to warm.
Only the approaching sound of sharp, tapping footsteps forced them to stop.
Caleb stepped back, pushing a rather trembling hand through his hair. Amelia smoothed her skirt.
“Did you actually double-check in your suitcase before deciding to manhandle me?” she asked with a stern look.
“No,” Caleb said, and grinned wickedly. Amelia would have gasped, but at that moment Lady Ruperta appeared around a corner, trailed by her housekeeper.
It was like the approach of a royal procession, albeit a very small one.
Amelia’s dignity yanked her into perfect posture with the speed of someone whose adolescence had been ruled by a pitiless tyrant boarding school headmistress.
But Lady Ruperta afforded her only the briefest glance, a mere flicker of generic disgust that consigned Amelia, her dignity, and her doctorate into a bin labeled Tradesperson.
Garbed in black, Lady Ruperta seemed to sap the light from oil lamps along the corridor walls as she went.
Her taffeta dress made a spectral whisper.
Her shadow seemed as baleful as the weather outside.
The housekeeper, also in black, did not lower herself by even a glance.
She was an austere woman named Mrs. Cuddle (pronounced eerily alike to cudgel), who wore at her waist a chatelaine of keys that no doubt would have been bones had she lived a thousand years ago.
Amelia put her hands behind her back lest she cross herself.
Within seconds, the women had departed around another corner, but Amelia knew their image would haunt the night to come.
“I swear, Radcliffe could have written Lady Ruperta’s character,” Caleb murmured.
“Do you mean Egremont Radcliffe, who took part in the Rising of the North?” Amelia asked confusedly.
Caleb chuckled, and he brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek, even though Amelia was almost certain one did not exist there. “As soon as we’re home again I am going to buy you a novel.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“Because you—are a termagant who drives me insane!” he replied, his voice rising as he stepped away from her. Amelia sighed noiselessly before looking around to see a door beginning to open farther down the corridor. Pipe smoke drifted out.
“Fiend!” she snapped, and retrieving her book from the floor, she stomped off around the same corner Lady Ruperta and Mrs. Cuddle had taken.
Then stopped, astonished, to see a long stretch of corridor ahead of her, not a single door within it, and neither woman anywhere in sight.
“Where did they go?” Amelia asked herself aloud, looking around. But she was entirely alone in the corridor.
Maybe they were ghosts. Disturbed, she hugged her book as she hurried on to the sitting room and the work that awaited her there.