Chapter Twenty #2
“We must have gone past an active thaumaturgic antique,” she said.
“The hallway was empty,” Caleb argued.
“Then something under the floorboards.”
Caleb shook his head. “We’d have experienced effects before, were that the case.”
“Then it must be this,” Amelia said, taking the locket out from where she’d stashed it in her skirt pocket. “It created a temporal bubble to prevent us from leaving the property. Perhaps it’s doing something similar now.”
“A binding magic?” Caleb said. “Well, opening it broke the enchantment before. Let’s try that.”
Amelia unlatched the case and opened it to reveal the tooth within. Caleb grimaced. “That’s disgusting.”
“It’s just a tooth, Caleb. You have several of your own in your mouth.”
“Yes, but that looks ancient, and not in an exciting, I-want-to-study-it way.”
“Let’s try again for the exit,” Amelia said.
They headed once more toward the entrance hall but were a few yards from reaching it when suddenly a door ahead flung open.
Caleb stopped abruptly, catching Amelia’s arm to keep her still, and they waited for someone to leap out and accuse them of shenanigans.
No one appeared, however, and after a minute the door swung shut again without any human intervention, its latch clicking back into place with a contemptuous tsk.
“Well, that’s not spooky,” Caleb murmured. They turned back to the entrance hall, and he sighed. “But that is.”
With some frustration, they considered the drawing room in which they now stood.
Maniacally floral wallpaper in shades of mauve and pink would have disoriented them had not the sudden relocation already done so.
Candlelight drifted with grief-colored ghosts that reached out indistinct hands toward them, gasping, weeping, starved for humanity.
“This is nonsense,” Amelia declared in strident tones. “I cannot be wasting my time in such fashion. Students are in peril from Vanity Tunnicliffe and need me to save them.”
“Us,” Caleb corrected her.
“That’s what I said.” Snapping the locket shut, she jammed it into her skirt pocket, then marched for the door. Throwing it ajar, she stepped through.
Darkness swallowed her whole.
—
“Damn,” Amelia muttered, since there was no one around to hear her bad language. The darkness pressed against her like an old eiderdown quilt, hot, suffocating, and smelling faintly of mold. Reaching through it, she discovered bare wooden walls close by on either side of her.
“Secret passageway!” she spoke aloud, trying to diminish the oppressive pitch-black silence with her voice.
She did not know whether to prioritize aggravation or a relief that she was still inside the living world.
Panic, however, made a vociferous argument that it should take precedence.
You’re going to be trapped in this house forever, it screamed along her nerves.
You’ll become one of the nameless ghosts, begging to be heard, eternally misunderstood.
“Rubbish,” Amelia chided herself coolly.
Did panic not appreciate that she was Professor Amelia Tarrant?
Certainly, this current snafu was a challenge—how exactly did one find a concealed exit in complete darkness?
—but she’d faced worse over the years. She’d been dragged by magic into a funereal urn; stuck in a haunted castle tower when its ancient stairs collapsed; and forced to search the basement of Miss Honeychurch’s Kitchenware Museum for an enchanted egg cup.
This now represented nothing more than a time-consuming diversion.
“Amelia!” Caleb’s voice, faint but heartwarming, echoed from a distance. Immediately, panic breathed a sigh of relief. Amelia’s perception of the world reoriented until Caleb became its north, and she turned, making her way slowly toward him.
“Caleb!” she called, her fingers trailing over the walls as she went, feeling for any suggestion of an exit. The spiders will all be above me, she assured herself.
The spiders will all be above me! her brain echoed, but in the opposite tone. She picked up speed.
“Amelia!” Caleb shouted again. A rhythmic knocking followed, like a heartbeat, calm and steady, to guide her. Closing her eyes, Amelia focused on it, her own heartbeat in synchronicity. Closer and closer…
“Meely,” Caleb seemed to murmur into her ear. She felt him near, his smiling golden spirit encompassing her. The now-familiar flutters stirred within her stomach in recognition and welcome.
“Caleb!”
“I can hear you,” he replied from behind layers of magic. “Sing something, and I’ll find you.”
She laughed. “Certainly not!”
“Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,” he chanted, and Amelia rolled her eyes.
It was a nursery rhyme they’d used like private code throughout their childhood, and which she’d abandoned for the sake of dignity in adolescence.
Still, every now and again Caleb would sing a line or two just to tease her—for example, from the audience while she was trying to give a serious presentation. He was a nuisance, a pest.
“Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” she sang in response.
“Stop there!” His tone was so serious, Amelia halted at once. “Don’t move!”
“Caleb…” she began warily.
CRASH!
Alarmed, Amelia leaped back as one of the walls shuddered. What the—
CRASH! Suddenly a section of the wall slammed open, sending light bursting into the passageway.
Dust rained down like shattered darkness.
The house groaned so dreadfully that it felt for a moment like it might collapse entirely.
Amelia cowered, hands over her head to protect her from the terrifying possibility of falling arachnids.
Caleb walked through the space where a secret door had stood before he’d kicked it open so forcefully that its latch had broken and its edge splintered.
He looked like an angel: radiant with golden lamplight, furious at the darkness in which he’d found her.
Without a word, he picked her up like a sack of flour, sparing no consideration whatsoever for her self-locomotive capabilities, and carried her out to a painfully bright room.
Amelia squinted, her eyes burning as they tried to adjust to the sudden change.
“Did you have to break open the door?” she asked.
“Yes.” Caleb set her on her feet, and half a second later she was being hugged to within an inch of her life. Sighing, she relaxed against his body, allowing him the comfort of comforting her.
“Din, din, don. Din, din, don,” he whispered, completing the rhyme.
Amelia lifted her face toward him, this man who was her sun, and he smiled.
Unthinkingly, instinctively, she kissed that smile.
He welcomed her without hesitation or complication, just a deep need to reconnect.
The kiss was soft, warm. It went on for a few seconds or forever…
In some ways, Amelia felt they had been kissing like this since the moment they met.
Finally, with her calm restored, she laid her head against his shoulder again.
“Please stop disappearing on me,” he said in a conversational tone. “It does uncomfortable things to my blood pressure.”
“Lady Ruperta is going to make you more than uncomfortable when she sees what you’ve done to her secret door. Why didn’t you just push it open gently?”
“I did.”
“Um,” Amelia disputed.
“I wanted to use an ax,” he said, “but the servants probably would have charged me a year’s worth of salary to borrow one.” His embrace tightened. “I’d have broken down the entire house to get to you.”
She laughed. “Please quit your job as a teacher and become a poet instead.”
“Terrible idea. All my poems would be titled ‘Amelia,’ and I’d be disparaged as a one-trick pony.”
The flutters beneath her heart perked up, wondering if they should take action, but Amelia assured them this was nothing compared to how Caleb usually spoke to her.
Ooh, they answered dreamily, and shook themselves so that a velvety gold feeling billowed through her.
She smiled against the privacy of Caleb’s shoulder.
“Were you hurt?” he asked, his voice low with concern.
“Not at all. Where are we?” The room in which they stood appeared to be empty of all but a chaise lounge and piano, and its lack of old clutter made her instantly worried that they’d stepped out of time or into a whole other house.
“We’re just down from the Mauve Drawing Room.”
This answer, along with the manner in which his hand was stroking her back, soothed Amelia completely.
She could have stood for hours, resting against him, being petted.
“You didn’t go far,” he said. “I’d suspected this room had a hidden door, so once I figured out that you were inside the walls, I came to look for it. Only a few minutes have—”
“A few minutes!” Amelia interjected with a horrified gasp. She pulled away from him, scowling around the room as if she could locate the lost time and reclaim it, along with a few extra seconds in compensation for her trouble. “We’ll never catch Vanity now.”
“But we know where she’s heading,” Caleb reminded her. “And it’s unlikely that she knows her way around the uni. We’ll take a morning train and be back in Oxford before she even finds her way to Balliol College, let alone to Dervorguilla’s brooch.”
“If we manage to escape this house,” Amelia added grimly. “Right now, that feels impossible.”
“I don’t know if the locket is to blame or not,” Caleb said, “but why don’t we just put it down somewhere and leave without it?”
Amelia shook her head. “No, that doesn’t feel wise. Such an incredibly strong binding power…Lady Ruperta was right, Sir Nigel is a terrible person to have power like that anywhere within his reach.”
“True. He might use it to trap someone in a room and talk at them for hours. Let’s at least put it in a safe bag. That should repress the magic.”