Chapter Eighteen #2
“Hm.” She gazed at him unfocusedly, appearing to contemplate his idea.
But Caleb could sense the panic rising within her, although she seemed outwardly untroubled, with no more than a twitch at the corner of one eye disturbing her expression.
This situation was delaying them from their goal, and Amelia did not do well with being late.
One terrible day, when she’d missed the train to a lecture on King Edward Longshanks’s enchanted trousers, she’d been so stressed, she’d cut a fringe in her hair.
Catching tonight’s train was considerably more important than a lecture, but they now had zero chance of achieving it, and Caleb could only be glad there were no scissors nearby—unless someone had buried a pair in this field, that is.
Suddenly, Amelia jolted into action. Striding across to a clump of tall weeds, she scuffed her shoe against the ground. Caleb watched her in wary astonishment.
“What are you doing?”
“If you’re right about this bubble being caused by something magical buried out here, we need to find whatever it is and try to break its power.
” Crouching, she began to dig at the earth.
“The pocket watch was under a shrub, so an obvious hypothesis is that anything else would be buried under a similar landmark. We have to work fast, Caleb.”
“We’ve probably already missed the train,” he pointed out.
“Maybe.” Dirt and torn grass flew around her, and Caleb guessed that she wasn’t going to surrender her goal of reaching Staveley on time until the very last shred of impossible hope was gone.
“Regardless, it’s going to be dark soon.
And very cold. And there’s rain in those clouds.
” Rising, she began tugging on the weeds.
“A thaumaturgic bubble won’t save us from hypothermia.
We have to work fast before it’s too dark to search for… ”
She paused as she ripped the clump of weeds from the ground, staggering with the force of her effort.
“…whatever the hell…”
She paused again to toss the weeds away, and Caleb hastily reared back, saving himself from being whacked in the face by daisies and grass and brown wheat-like things.
“…got us stuck here,” she concluded, brushing her dirt-stained hands together.
“Good point,” Caleb said.
Amelia threw him an exasperated look. “Then why are you just standing there?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Thinking!” Pivoting sharply, she set her shoe heel against a small rock and pushed, attempting to lever it out of the ground.
Caleb retreated farther in case it would be the next thing thrown at him.
Amelia was the most sedate person he’d ever known…
until she wasn’t. But he himself had no intention of breaking a fingernail digging up half the field, not when he had two decades of quality education at his disposal.
Scanning the area, he noticed a nearby patch of daffodils.
Spring flowers at this time of year certainly suggested a leak of thaumaturgic energy from the ground beneath them.
The fact that they were blue daffodils reinforced this idea.
Wandering over, Caleb put his hands in his trouser pockets as he contemplated the flowers.
“What is it?” Amelia asked, hurrying across. Her hair had begun slipping from its knot, and her face was flushed with exercise. She would have looked like a wild-hearted Catherine Earnshaw were it not for the intelligence sparking in her dark eyes.
“All right, so pausing to think might have been a moderately good idea,” she conceded, frowning at the daffodils.
A few seconds later, she turned the frown on him.
Somehow it made her even more fiercely beautiful.
Never mind being like a book character; she was like Shakespeare’s fairy queen Titania, or the heroine of an opera.
Then her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I suppose you’re waiting for me to do the digging? ”
No, I’m falling even deeper in love with you, Caleb thought. But aloud he said, “There doesn’t seem any sense to us both dirtying our hands.”
With a scoffing laugh, Amelia crouched down. “I think someone’s dug here recently,” she said as she worked. Clumps of dirt smashed against Caleb’s shoes, but he dared not complain, not with Amelia in this mood.
“Aha!” she declared seconds later. Standing, she held up a gold locket dangling from a chain.
“Well done,” Caleb said. Then his pulse tripped as he recognized it. “That’s the locket I was looking for the other day.”
Taking it in her hand, Amelia made a small, interested sound. “Tingles.”
“Come now, Professor, don’t you mean ‘nerve stimulation due to thaumaturgic discharge’?” Caleb asked, grinning.
“ ‘Tingles’ is more efficient,” Amelia said. She weighed the locket thoughtfully. “What does it do?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t gotten around to assessing it.”
Both glanced at the enchanted air surrounding them, then exchanged a shrug.
“Seems obvious?” they said in unison.
“Does rather,” they answered together.
“Open it,” Caleb suggested, gesturing at the locket.
“It might explode,” Amelia said.
“Eh. It’s been a good life.”
Amelia paused, contemplating the risk, then went ahead anyway.
After all, risk was practically a nickname for material history studies (in fact, most MH students called it “Bric-a-Brac-a-Boom Studies,” but Amelia did try to elevate her language now that she was a professor).
She’d never get anything done in her job if she worried all the time about things blowing up in her face.
Pressing the locket’s latch, she carefully levered open the case. “Huh,” she said with surprise. “There’s a tooth inside. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Caleb did not reply. He was watching the air shimmer like molten rainbows behind her as the thaumaturgic bubble dissolved.
They were right, the locket had been responsible; opening it had immediately unraveled the magic.
The sight was beautiful, illuminating Amelia’s hair, crowning her with tiny white stars until she seemed indeed like a fairy queen…
a heavenly queen…the goddess of his heart.
Caleb knew that, from now on, every time he reread A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he would envision Titania with dark hair, a plaid skirt, and dirt-packed fingernails.
If, that is, he remained capable of reading at all, considering how his brain also seemed to be dissolving into gossamer dreams while he gazed spellbound at Amelia. Then she looked up from the locket at the eroding magic, and her eyes widened.
“Oh my,” she said rather breathlessly. “What a pretty manifestation of unconstrained thaumaturgic discharge.” She looked at him again, lucent, lovely, and completely Amelia with her dry humor and endless practicality.
Caleb felt so enchanted, it was as though the magic had pooled in his heart.
“I am compelled to admit,” she said, “that you were very clever to have found the burial spot so quickly.”
“No, no,” Caleb said, shaking his head. He lowered his eyelashes and glanced up through them at her, offering his sweetest smile. “I was a bloody genius.”
“Language!”
At the sharp voice, they both spun about in fright.
Two elderly women emerged from behind a nearby bush where they must have been hiding all along.
They looked like grandmothers from a children’s tale of country life, with floral cotton dresses, aprons, and gum boots, but their menacing expressions and the alarmingly sharp farm implements they held made it evident that this was very much an adult horror story instead.
The spade propped against one woman’s shoulder was exactly the kind Caleb imagined gravediggers used, and the pitchfork grasped by the other could well have been what required a grave to be dug in the first place.
He stepped back nervously just as Amelia stepped toward him.
Their hands reached for each other and clung tight.
“Good evening,” Amelia said in a serenely polite voice, as if they were standing outside a High Street shop, making small talk. “I believe we’ve met before? In the Staveley pub?”
“We have,” answered one woman. “I’m Hilda, and this here’s Mavis.
And you are the antiquarians.” She made it sound like a crime—which, to be fair, Caleb was beginning to think it was, considering this blasted assignment.
He summoned a charming smile, the one he employed specifically with older ladies, and that had over the years gained him all the antique brooches (and all the cake) he wanted.
“We’re in a hurry to reach Staveley but seem to have got turned around,” he explained.
“What are two ladies such as yourselves doing out…here…” His voice trailed off as his brain finally leaped back into action, taking note first of the dirty spade, then of the ground from which Amelia had just retrieved the locket.
Well, that was interesting. “Miss—” he said gorgeously.
“That’s ma’am to you,” Hilda snapped, glaring at him so fiercely his smile vanished with all the speed of a suffragette printing an edifying brochure. He clutched Amelia’s hand even harder. “There’s no point trying your masculine wiles on me, lad. You professors are a pain in the—”
She paused.
“Rear end?” Mavis suggested.
Hilda shook her head. “I was going to say ‘proverbial,’ but you know how I feel about alliteration, Mavis.”
“I do, Hilda,” Mavis replied sympathetically.
“Pain in the bum,” Hilda amended, scowling, and everyone blushed.
“We heard about you finding the Russian pocket watch and taking it back to that darned villain, Nigel Harroway,” Hilda said, jabbing her spade toward Ravenscroft Manor in such a violent gesture that Caleb wondered if, inside the house, Sir Nigel shuddered as though someone had just walked over his grave.
“And now here you are with another antique in your hands, like you’ve got some kind of map to them all. ”
“All?” Amelia echoed. “Do you mean there are more buried out here?” She drew in a deep breath, clearly intending to lecture the women about safety practices when dealing with thaumaturgic antiques.
Just then, Mavis jammed the pronged end of her pitchfork into the ground, causing the handle to shudder, and Caleb watched Amelia change plans between breathing in and breathing out again.
“That explains the seasonal anomalies,” she said instead.
Caleb tried smiling at the women again. “I hope we didn’t intrude upon some treasure-hunting game?”
“That’s not for us to say,” Hilda snarled, and he gave up the smile as a waste of effort. “We’re going to take you to someone who’ll decide what to tell you…and what to do with you.”
“We are?” Mavis said with some surprise. “Who, Hilda?”
The other woman gave her a sharp look. “You know, Mavis.”
“No, I— Oh wait, you mean—”
“Yes. Do try to keep up, dear.” She pointed the spade at Caleb and Amelia. “Let’s go.”
“We can’t!” Amelia exclaimed, caution disintegrating in her urgency. “We have to recover a dangerous—”
“Dangerous?” Hilda scoffed. “Pft! What could a little girl like you know about danger? You’re running around out here in the half dark, getting tangled up in magic when a storm’s about to break.”
“We should show them real danger,” Mavis said. Yanking the pitchfork out of the ground, she lifted it and, grinning, touched a finger to one of the sharp points.
“Are you going to kill us?” Amelia gasped.
“What?!” Mavis stared at her with alarm. “Of course not! I’m saying, farm implements are really dangerous. What is it with the younger generation these days, Hilda? So dramatic!”
“It’s probably all that education,” Hilda answered with a shrug. “It bloats the brain.” She shook her head. “Enough talking. Move, Professors. Now.”
Caleb rapidly considered his options. If it came to a physical altercation, fortune almost certainly would not bet on him.
He might be a man who kept himself fit by playing rugby and running away from university bursars, but these two elderly ladies clearly had spent their lives breathing fresh air, drinking milk still warm from the cow, and going on hikes through the countryside because they wanted to.
Caleb knew his match when he saw it. He wasn’t even sure he and Amelia could outrace them, no matter how close the shelter of Ravenscroft Manor seemed.
He’d thought the road close too. The magical bubble caused by the locket had dissolved, but there might be any number of thaumaturgic objects hidden out here to stop them in one manner or another.
No, all things considered, and with the expertise of someone who’d been in trouble more times in his life than he could count, he decided to surrender for now, and await a better opportunity for escape. “Lead the way,” he said.
“How kind of you to approve your kidnapping,” Hilda remarked dryly, then gestured for them to get moving. Amelia gave Caleb an anxious frown, and he smiled reassuringly at her in response. Without a word, they allowed themselves to be herded across the field toward the rear of Ravenscroft Manor.
As the shadow of the great house reached out to engulf them, a distant horn could be faintly heard, blistering the evening’s quiet.
Caleb realized what it was when Amelia exhaled a shuddering breath: the train leaving Staveley, taking Vanity Tunnicliffe and the perilous Hereford teaspoon south to disaster.