Chapter Thirteen #2
Shock went through Amelia like a thaumaturgic blast, stopping her abruptly in her tracks.
But then she realized the child wasn’t speaking to her.
Across the room, in a pathetically narrow bed, a man lay white-faced, shrunken to the bone by cholera.
Caleb’s father. Amelia remembered Caleb describing this afternoon to her in terms that had not fully encompassed the stench of the room or the despair he’d felt.
An hour later, his mother had come home from her factory job and taken him in her arms, comforting him despite her own grief.
A year later, he’d been sponsored to attend boarding school, setting him on the path to becoming a teacher himself.
And thirteen years after that, having worked in every spare moment, including summer holidays, he’d finally rescued his mother from the slum, buying her a tiny cottage in beautiful, peaceful Dorset, where she lived yet.
He was happy. Amelia knew all this, but even so felt as if her heart might break for the little boy crouching alone with death. She closed her eyes, wishing…
“Amelia Tarrant!”
She looked up at the sound of her name being called in a warm, triumphant tone.
The scene had changed; time had skittered in a new direction.
Before her lay a stage, populated by half a dozen students standing in a tidy row and a teacher at a lectern; it was the latter who had spoken.
An audience began to clap politely as a girl stepped from the line—her seventeen-year-old self, Amelia realized.
This was the graduation ceremony at boarding school, and she was about to be awarded her second prize of the day, this one for Most Helpful Student. And Caleb…
She turned to see an adolescent Caleb standing nearby in the wings, his face a little flushed, his breath panting, suggesting that he’d run to get there.
His hair was deplorably tumbled, although somehow it looked perfect on him, as if he’d been interrupted painting a Romantic masterpiece or composing the next great novel.
His jacket, shabby and thin, anticipated the shoulder breadth he’d develop in years to come.
As for his tie—Amelia winced a little to see its state of disarray.
He’d overslept, she remembered, despite the ceremony taking place in the mid-afternoon. In five minutes’ time he’d be named Most Inventive Student, and the audience of their peers would go wild in celebration as he sauntered onto the stage like a fairy prince playing at being human for a while.
Amelia smiled, the recollection providing somewhat of a balm after the misery she’d just witnessed.
But then, while she gazed at Caleb, the smile slowly faded into confusion.
For his expression was almost sorrowful as he watched her past self accept the award, and Amelia could not understand—did he wish to be Most Helpful Student himself?
In that case he ought not have installed the school’s milk cow in the headmistress’s office overnight.
He pressed a hand against his heart, sighing in a way that indicated more than just breathlessness from having run.
It was the sigh of a young man who’d read a lovely, soulful poem and grieved that he could not step into its universe.
The sigh of a boy first learning that the age of chivalric knights was long gone.
Or, incredibly, the sigh Amelia herself had given too many times through her adolescence—secretly loving this gorgeous, kind friend of hers, desperately wishing they could share more than friendship, and knowing they never would.
As onstage Amelia shook the teacher’s hand, Caleb’s expression melted into a smile more tender than any Amelia had ever seen.
Then the scene swayed dizzyingly. Caleb became a golden shadow; the audience’s applause faded into a vague tumult.
Amelia blinked, and suddenly she was four years ahead, dancing with Caleb at a university ball.
Spangles of lantern light swirled around them, the rest of the world a blur as they waltzed in its heart.
Watching, she echoed the sigh she’d just heard from Caleb, remembering this evening and how she had felt comprised of nothing but light and music, held so assuredly in Caleb’s hands while he not only danced to perfection but also treated her with exquisite, formal manners…
She blinked again, and found herself in shadow.
Every emotion sank to the pit of her stomach.
Nearby, crouching on the damp grass behind a boarding school dormitory, a young girl was weeping with such loneliness and hurt that it took Amelia’s breath away.
Even all these years later, with a degree and a professorship and a pleasant life, she remembered in exact detail the crush of that loneliness, and still felt the hurt some days, as if it had left a scar deep in her soul.
“Are you a lost fairy?”
At the sweet question, she turned, and on the ground her younger self looked up. They both stared at the fair-haired boy gently approaching. He had about him a warmth that seemed to be sourced from pure sunshine, and he smiled as if with sheer happiness at being alive.
“No, I don’t think you are,” he said musingly as he considered her. “Fairies don’t have drippy noses.”
Amelia laughed. And the little girl she’d been, tears glinting in her dark eyes like dreams while she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, laughed too.
Hearing it, Amelia’s emotions rose again in a great, beautiful swell to fill her throat with all the years of delight, good cheer, and love she’d experienced since this moment.
Suddenly, someone clasped her hand, drawing her back into the light.
“Got you,” Caleb said.
Amelia looked around dazedly, one last time.
Recognizing Ravenscroft Manor’s cluttered drawing room, she felt the steady weight of the rain-hushed torpor that had been smothering her all week, and that soothed her racing pulse now.
A moment later she was being turned roughly, fingers digging into her arms, blue eyes staring at her with a fear that had defied time to find her and bring her home.
Not Oxford home but at his side, where she belonged.
Caleb. Amelia’s heart cried with sorrow and relief.
She wanted to take him in her arms, comforting the little boy who had been so cruelly hurt.
She wanted to kiss the man who had spent the past two decades making her laugh as if it were his best beloved dream coming true again and again.
But their fellow academics were looking on, big-eyed with worry, confusion, and excitement.
“Oh, Professor Tarrant, it was so frightening!” Vanity exclaimed. “You were flashing in and out of visibility! And then Professor Sterling rescued you, like a knight of yore.”
“Knight? Hardly!” Throckmorton scoffed.
“He just pulled her out of the spell,” Dummersby agreed, grumbling. “He didn’t slay a dragon for her.”
“It was so heroic,” Vanity sighed, nevertheless.
Amelia wanted to sigh herself, although in an entirely different tone from Vanity’s, for it was obvious the story of this event was going to be shared all through the antiquarian community.
Taking a slow, steadying breath, she returned Caleb’s gaze with a temperate one of her own.
He on the other hand appeared rather desperate, as if he anticipated her disappearing again at any moment.
I’m safe, she assured him wordlessly. I’m here with you.
But aloud she said in a cool, slightly disapproving voice, “You can unhand me now, Professor Sterling. There is no need for such dramatics.”
“I am not the one who slipped out of time, Professor Tarrant,” he replied, giving her one of his rare, fierce, genuine frowns, the kind he usually reserved for cheating students, conservative politicians, and cold coffee. Don’t leave me again.
How could a moon ever leave her soul’s gravity? she’d have told him, had she been able to speak truly. But even a fleeting smile was impossible, considering their audience.
“Slipped out of time?” Vanity echoed with a disorienting mix of histrionics and glee. “Egad, Mr. Hunt was right! Time’s fabric is ripping apart!”
“Not at all,” Amelia said, practically yanking herself out of Caleb’s grip so as to turn and smile at the girl. “It was only a small pocket of retrospective experience. Time didn’t come apart; it drew me in.”
“Drew in how?” Throckmorton demanded, the words thick with pipe smoke.
Amelia was not about to share what she’d seen.
She wasn’t even sure at this point whether she would tell Caleb.
Although the visit into his past had been accidental, it still felt like an intrusion, and she feared making him even half as embarrassed by it as she was herself—embarrassed and confused and really quite dizzied by the vision of his eyes filled with such…
love…as he’d watched her. And not the genial love of friendship, either, but one that wanted to express itself directly, with hands and lips and other body parts Amelia dared not even think about lest she spontaneously combust, which would be highly unprofessional of her, to say nothing of un-Tarrant-like.
“What caused it?” she mused aloud, looking around at the dozens of antiques cluttering the room.
Temporal disruption was a vanishingly rare magic (literally vanishingly, as she’d just experienced), and certainly not one they wanted to introduce to the British Museum’s thaumaturgic milieu, unless Dummersby and his associates liked the idea of holding interactive presentations of ancient warriors and dinosaur fossils.
No, an object with that kind of power needed to go into the Ashmolean’s double-locked vault.
If they ever found it, that is, among Sir Nigel’s junk.