Chapter Twenty-One
History teaches us that discord doesn’t happen
because people speak different languages, but because
they simply don’t want to listen.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
Professor Ottersock’s words chilled Amelia so thoroughly, she felt as though she’d been turned to stone. In the gloom, with his pipe smoke and the large black umbrella he held overhead, he gave the impression of being more a dragon than a faculty—
Thud.
Yanking the door from Grimshaw’s hold, Caleb had slammed it shut before Amelia could realize what he was doing, let alone stop him.
The sound of Ottersock’s shocked exclamation was heard through the wood, and Amelia pressed a finger against her brow, where the low-grade headache she’d been feeling all week now threatened a migraine.
“There is a small chance you probably shouldn’t have done that,” she told Caleb wearily.
“There is an even greater chance you’re right,” he agreed. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Fright?” Amelia suggested. “Anxiety?”
“Horror at his triple tweed outfit.” Releasing her hand from his grasp, he donned a rueful expression, straightened his shoulders with the air of Hector preparing to meet Achilles outside Troy, then reached for the door handle.
Grimshaw got there before him. With a scowl that had Caleb figuratively hung, drawn, and quartered for the crime of usurping a butler’s door-operation privileges, he opened the door once again.
“Good evening, sir,” he intoned to Professor Ottersock, although it was clear what he meant was, My apologies, I am in no way associated with these idiots.
Ottersock, pipe bobbing and sideburns trembling, muttered something dour that sounded in turn like, “Apologies accepted, since I am associated with these idiots.” He bustled through the doorway before he might be shut out again, his umbrella dripping rain and bad luck all over the flagstones.
As he closed it, Amelia and Caleb retreated several steps to avoid being “accidentally” smacked with said umbrella.
“You look like you’re about to leave,” he remarked as he scanned them and their luggage from beneath a hairy frown, proving why he was paid the big money (eighty pounds a year) to head a university faculty.
“Miss Tunnicliffe has stolen the teaspoon I st—er, discovered in Hereford Cathedral,” Amelia informed him. “She intends to use it to access Dervorguilla of Galloway’s brooch. We are about to undertake hot pursuit.”
“Cold pursuit, more like it,” Ottersock rebutted, “considering the weather. And I see magic is afoot,” he added, watching the footmen trying to shove the coat rack into a closet. “Why am I not surprised to find chaos happening in your vicinity? You’re not going anywhere tonight, Professor Tarrant.”
That, apparently, was that: his pipe smoke gave an autocratic billow, and Grimshaw took this as a signal to close the door.
“No!” Amelia said, forestalling the butler. “We must leave at once.”
“At once,” Caleb agreed.
“At once,” Grimshaw practically pleaded.
“You can’t just go running off into the night,” Ottersock said. “Especially since I have come all the way here to talk to you. Close the damn door and point me in the direction of the nearest teakettle.”
Grimshaw began swinging the door shut with an even more doleful expression than usual.
“Wait!” Amelia interjected. The butler froze once again. “We must stop Vanity before she steals the brooch!”
“Pff,” Ottersock scoffed. “Miss Tunnicliffe is just a girl with a mediocre education. She’s no danger to anyone.”
“She has a gun,” Caleb said tersely.
“And contacts in the black market,” Amelia added.
“And she’s smarter than she acts,” they concluded in unison.
Ottersock hesitated at last, his eyes sharp as he regarded them.
Amelia suspected, however, that it was not their arguments he was considering but their physical proximity to each other.
She moved a discreet step away from Caleb, then realized with an internal wince that doing so had only served to highlight just how close to him she’d actually been.
Ottersock’s regard grew so sharp he could have outright stabbed her with it.
“The only place you two are going is into a private room with me,” he declared.
“I want to know why I received a bill for one hundred pounds from the Black Boar pub in Staveley. One. Hundred. ‘For damages incurred.’ And why Lady Ruperta Harroway sent a testy letter demanding the university replace her dining room set. And I don’t want to even ask about that coat rack.
I sent you to Cumbria to stop the damages, for God’s sake!
Now this excellent gentleman butler is going to close the door and direct us to the warmest room in the house, with no further arguments. ”
“The parlor,” Amelia suggested in weary surrender. “That’s where Professor Throckmorton and Mr. Dummersby from the British Museum are. I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you.”
Instantly, Ottersock went pale. Snatching the pipe from his lips, he jabbed it at Grimshaw, who almost had the door shut.
“What are you doing, man?! Open that at once! We’re leaving!
Sterling!” Now he directed the pipe at Caleb, who appeared entirely confused at this extreme change of attitude.
“Help Tarrant get her luggage into my carriage. And hurry! We have to go before they find out that I’m here. ”
Within minutes the three antiquarians were crowded into Ottersock’s rented carriage and being driven toward Lancaster by a villager who’d been offered a small fortune (six pounds and a signed copy of the professor’s memoirs) to do so.
“Forget waiting for a train at Staveley; we’ll travel on through the night,” Ottersock said, relighting his pipe while Amelia and Caleb, side by side on the bench seat opposite him, tried to get comfortable beneath armloads of their luggage.
They regarded the faculty head with bemusement, for although this haste was (a) excellent, it was also (b) uncharacteristic of the man and (c-d) inexplicable, if not outright weird.
Seeing their expressions, Ottersock finally explained in a redolent puff of tobacco smoke: “I can’t risk Dummersby knowing I’m anywhere in Cumbria.
Last time I happened upon him at the Minervaeum, he trapped me in a corner for an hour, prattling on about his latest display of Egyptian jewelry.
It wasn’t even enchanted jewelry! And as for Basil Throckmorton—if he tells me one more time that the history department needs to start putting on plays to educate students by way of entertainment, I will be tempted to violence.
Learning should not be fun, or else every Tom, Dick, and Harry will want to do it, and experts will become ten a penny.
God knows a professor’s salary is low enough as it is!
” Furious, he pursed his lips so tight, his pipe jutted upward.
“Besides,” he added, with the pipe bobbing, “you said Miss Tunnicliffe was in trouble.”
“Causing trouble,” Caleb corrected him, but Ottersock wasn’t interested in becoming informed.
“Can’t imagine it of the girl, frankly. Sweet, good-humored, ladylike creature she was. No, you must have gotten the wrong idea. Trust me, I have an excellent nose for sniffing out lies.”
Puffing his pipe aggressively, he scrutinized first Amelia, then Caleb, then the two of them together.
“You both look done in. Let me guess: still dire enemies, fighting each other at every turn? Tsk. I was at a meeting of faculty heads the other day and you two were quite the topic of discussion. The consensus was that, if you can’t come to an accord, Professor Tarrant will have to be transferred to a curator role at the British Museum.
Dummersby’s been offering a plum role for you, dear. ”
It was as if he’d punched her in the stomach.
Amelia blinked with a calm that forestalled the sobs she could quite easily (and probably hysterically) have wept in that moment.
After all she’d done over these past few months to protect her job, it remained at risk.
She comprehended at last, with a dreary kind of surrender, that no matter what she did, Ottersock would persist in keeping her teetering on the edge of demotion or outright unemployment, just to show her that he was the one with power, no matter how successful and professional a woman she might be.
Caleb shifted a little beside her, his edges becoming sharper, his jaw tightening in a way that warned Amelia two seconds before he spoke. “You said the same thing when we were deemed too friendly,” he reminded Ottersock.
Judging from the rapidity with which Ottersock’s face reddened, Caleb’s gender alone saved him from being evicted from the carriage on the basis of impertinence. “There must be moderation in all things, Sterling. If history teaches us nothing else, it is this.”
Amelia would have laughed were circumstances different.
History had taught her that you only got what you wanted if you were immoderate, intense, and preferably had an army at your back.
But perhaps the lesson was different for women.
She wondered what Isabella, the She-Wolf of France, would do in this situation.
And then, since murdering Ottersock with his pipe was not really an option, she gave a silent sigh and turned her focus to the carriage window.
The world outside was a weeping darkness, not even one single light to be seen for hope’s sake.
It felt like she was still inside Ravenscroft Manor, only in concentrated form.
“I notice,” Caleb said to Ottersock, “that no one is forcing Throckmorton out of his job because he has an enmity with Professor Tarrant…and with me…and with you, for that matter.”
Ottersock sniffed. “Throckmorton is a tenured professor. The only way we’ll get rid of him is if someone accidentally hands him an explosive medieval antique.”
“But you can get rid of me,” Caleb pointed out. “I’m the one who should take the curator job.”