Chapter Seventeen #2
She did not indicate the way, or indeed move the slightest muscle, and it remained only for Caleb to offer a polite nod and silently make his exit.
He felt oddly soiled and wanted to go at once for a bath, to scrub old memories from his skin until he was renewed.
Instead, slipping a casual smile onto his face, he stepped out into the corridor.
And collided with a perambulating red-and-white barber’s pole. Only upon being thwacked in the face with a topknot of hair did he realize it was in fact Vanity. The young woman gasped so ostentatiously, Caleb suspected she’d not bumped into him but actually pounced.
“Oh, Professor Sterling!” she squeaked and giggled, and Caleb discovered that he was capable of genuine chivalry when he stopped himself from wincing. “Fancy meeting you here!”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Are you on your way to drinkies? Shall we go together?”
Caleb would rather leap off a cliff than accompany anyone who used the word drinkies, but it was too late: Vanity had her arm hooked around his and was practically dragging him down the corridor. Oh well, he thought, surrendering to his fate; at least I won’t get lost with her.
—
Amelia had tucked herself into a corner of the drawing room with her back against the wall, as physically far from the crowd as she could manage, and several hundred years away mentally, musing about how Queen Elizabeth Woodville might have occupied her time in sanctuary during the Wars of the Roses.
Amelia rather envied the beleaguered queen that respite from society.
Of course, the four men occupying the drawing room (and an undetermined number of servants) could not really be called a crowd…
No, rabble was a better descriptor. Throng.
MULTITUDE. And definitely the capital letters were justified.
The two academics were debating the Duke of Wellington’s scandalous life (“Publish!” Dummersby contended; “Be damned!” Throckmorton rebutted) while Sir Nigel tried to make verbal sallies into the discussion, only to fail each time.
His voice was approaching heights that would surely soon render him breathless.
Even Sergeant Sheffield’s presence added to the sense of overwhelm, for Amelia couldn’t help but fret a little about what exactly the man was thinking as he loomed in silence, a glass of sherry looking ridiculously fragile in his grip.
One flex of the fingers and he might shatter it.
Vanity had yet to make an appearance, for which Amelia could only be grateful.
Such a cheerful young woman, sweetly innocent, and unutterably annoying.
If her giggles were added to the present commotion, it would quite possibly break Amelia’s sanity.
This assignment had been a case study in frustration, but over the past couple of days she’d felt as if everything within her had been pushed right to the edge.
If only Caleb was able to touch her one more time and thus provide the sense of completion for which her body yearned, she might ease back into her usual Tarrant centeredness.
Just a single gentle touch, in an interesting place, for an extended period of time.
With motion applied. And associated kisses.
But surrounded as they were through the day by company, and with the perils of being caught together at night remaining too great, the impossibility of such a thing happening had left Amelia suffering to a degree not even her imagination could assuage.
Surely soon Lady Ruperta and Sir Nigel would declare that enough antiques had been assessed.
Already the wagon in the stables was packed high with items of assorted value, awaiting transport to the Staveley train station and then on to the British Museum.
Sir Nigel was in a near-constant state of mournful sniffling.
And Dummersby was even beginning to look concerned as to the capacity of the museum’s display space.
It all suggested that an announcement of their departure might happen at any time.
Such as now, Amelia thought, holding her breath…
But the chatter in the room went on. Or maybe now, she thought…
But Lady Ruperta did not enter. Sighing, Amelia lost hope that she would.
Caleb’s lack of attendance, however, was another matter.
His tardiness was par for the course, but considering all the dangerous magical antiques and obstreperous ghosts in the manor, Amelia worried that he’d fallen down several centuries or into a cannibalistic bathtub.
She tried to deflect her concerns by imagining those of Queen Elizabeth Woodville instead, but with no success.
Gripping a tiny plate of hors d’oeuvres that contained far too much sardine matter to actually eat, she kept her eye on the drawing room door.
Where are you, Caleb?
Suddenly, the door opened! But it admitted only Grimshaw, casting a pall over the gathering. “Dinner is served,” he announced.
The men began trooping out. But Amelia paused in the doorway, feeling more troubled than she could explain.
“Mr. Grimshaw, have you seen Professor Sterling this evening?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the butler intoned lugubriously. “He and Miss Tunnicliffe went upstairs. Together. Privately.”
Oh.
Amelia went from history to geography in one wild leap as memories of Caleb kissing her were crushed by what felt like an enormous boulder dropping into her stomach, their fragments turning to ash in the veritable forest fire blazing across her cheeks.
Half a second later, however, she was rescued by reasonable thinking and her faith in her best friend. Caleb might read poetry, but he wouldn’t caress one woman under a tree, then mere days later take another to his bed.
“It was just the pair of them,” continued the butler, fitting out a coffin in which to place his murder victim, i.e., Vanity’s reputation.
“I’m sure they are involved in academic business,” Amelia told him sternly. “I shall go up to let them know dinner is ready.”
“I’ll have a footman accompany you.”
“That is not necessary,” Amelia assured him, but Grimshaw had already summoned one of the servants. Thus encumbered, Amelia headed up to Caleb’s bedroom, with every step urgently trying to decide how she could fix this situation without causing embarrassment to poor Vanity.
But upon arriving at the bedroom, Amelia took one look at the sight that met her there and discarded any thought of kindness. “Good God!” she exclaimed.
“Mmphm!” Caleb interjected from where he sat bound to a wooden chair, gagged with a handkerchief.
All around him was a horrifying mess of clothes, bedding, and—Amelia gasped—her Mary Wollstonecraft biography lying open on the floor, several of its pages folded!
At the far side of the room, Vanity was pushing open the window.
The young woman turned, raising a furled parasol like a weapon.
“Oh, it’s only you,” she said with a sharp smile. “Hello, Miss Tarrant.”
Ignoring these insults, Amelia crossed her arms and frowned, as if Vanity were one of her students. “What is going on here?” she demanded.
But Vanity just laughed, which no student would ever dare do.
Amelia’s blood went cold. It was a gritty, confident laugh, the kind that would have stomped on a giggle, turning it to glittery dust. “That’s a stupid question from such an educated woman.
Obviously, I’m stealing your seventeenth-century thaumaturgic teaspoon. ”
“Mmmph!” Caleb protested, rocking the chair beneath him as he tried to escape. But Amelia just quirked an eyebrow.
“Stealing, Miss Tunnicliffe? I know the salary of a receptionist must be low, but—”
Vanity interrupted her, scoffing. “I’m richer than you’ll ever be. The receptionist job was just a cover.”
All at once, Amelia understood. Vanity’s crimes were far worse than making everyone play charades. “You’re a trafficker for the black market.”
“ ‘Facilitator in the covert trade of thaumaturgic antiques,’ if you please,” Vanity corrected her archly.
“When I heard about Sir Nigel’s hoard, I decided to hitch a ride on this assignment.
But then I saw you with this at the Staveley pub.
” Producing from a skirt pocket Caleb’s Italian-milled sock, stuffed with the enchanted little spoon in its safe bag, she waggled it provokingly.
“It took me a while to get hold of it—and when I finally did, I dropped the blasted thing in the drawing room and you stepped on it. You realized what it was before I could retrieve it, and I was stuck in this bloody cursed place for longer. I had to resort to robbing the pretty professor or else go crazy. But it was worth it. Forget singing tankards and flaming sauceboats—this one teaspoon is far more valuable than all the treasures in the house.”
Amelia managed to remain calm in the face of such an appalling revelation, despite her future bestselling book about the teaspoon Caleb being in harm’s way. “It’s just an old spoon with a highly unstable thaumaturgic profile,” she said. “It won’t get you much on the black market.”
“Oh, I don’t plan to sell this,” Vanity answered, sneering.
“I know it brought down the Minervaeum Club’s ceiling.
Professor Sterling has been most informative.
A few giggles, a winsome interest in getting an education”—she fluttered her eyelashes, looking so earnest that Amelia, despite everything, felt an instinctual desire to hand her brochures on Oxford University’s history courses—“and he told me everything I wanted to know. If it can break a ceiling, it can break through barriers to something really valuable.”
“You’re going to rob a bank using a teaspoon?” Amelia’s eyebrow longed to quirk again, but she repressed it with a frown.
“Not a bank,” Vanity retorted. “Dervgilly of Glasgow’s magic brooch.”