Chapter Twenty-Three
History might have no beginning points,
but it certainly has endings.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
“So, you see, because the locket’s magic creates a bonding effect, my placing Miss Tunnicliffe’s earring inside it allowed me to bind her to its vicinity—close to the ground—and so counteract the teaspoon’s effects, bringing her down from the ceiling.”
Amelia paused following this explanation, looking at Ottersock’s desk rather than directly at the faculty head himself.
Caleb suspected that she was arguing with herself over whether she should apologize for the Hall’s broken window and also Sheffield’s cracked knee, caused when the man fell after catching Vanity. So he quickly spoke before she could.
“It was all my fault.”
“Actually, it’s my fault,” Ottersock said as he poured willow-bark powder into his tea.
“I should have sent you both on assignment to Greenland and left you there. Although you’d probably have caused a fire on the glaciers, knowing you two.
As it is, you were damned lucky that poor Miss Tunnicliffe didn’t plunge to her death. ”
He stirred his tea like exclamation points in action, the teaspoon clinking sharply against the cup.
On his desk lay another teaspoon: the little Hereford antique that had started all of this.
After Caleb had tossed it through the Hall’s window, it landed by sheer misfortune in front of Balliol’s second-best student, who knew how to recognize not only a thaumaturgic antique but an opportunity to become first-best. As Ottersock strode past him toward the Hall with proctors in tow, the enterprising young fellow had handed the teaspoon over.
Caleb doubted that Ottersock would ever relinquish it to Amelia again.
And judging from the rigidity of her posture, she believed the same.
“We were not lucky, Professor,” she said, her voice so steady and polite that the contradiction sounded practically like an agreement. “I closed the locket’s lid at a slow pace, which I was certain would be reflected in Miss Tunnicliffe’s rate of descent. I was correct.”
Ottersock halted in raising his teacup to pin her with a dictatorial stare. “You were lucky, Tarrant.”
“Yes, sir,” Amelia said, and Caleb bit back a curse word.
“It seems all’s well that end’s well, however,” Ottersock relented. He sipped tea, his face contorting with disgust at its taste. “Miss Tunnicliffe was unable to get hold of Dervorguilla’s brooch.”
All three of them shivered at the thought of her coming close to doing so.
“I might just have a word with Balliol’s master about putting that brooch in a restricted area,” Ottersock said. “Such power is simply too dangerous for public viewing, even with special protection.”
“The power of truth,” Caleb mused soberly.
“Can you imagine if just anyone was able to get their hands on it?” Ottersock added more willow bark to his tea and stirred with a troubled vigor. “Truth is not something that should be bandied about freely!”
Caleb did not argue. He also refrained from pointing out that Ottersock had inadvertently picked up the Hereford teaspoon instead of his own.
“Thank goodness poor Miss Tunnicliffe is unharmed by her ordeal,” the professor said.
“Indeed,” Caleb drawled. “Aggravated robbery is such a wearying task.”
Ottersock scowled at him. “Sergeant Sheffield has taken the girl into his custody and will make sure she gets what she deserves.”
“A wedding ring, no doubt,” Caleb said, thinking of Sheffield’s red face and foolish grin when Vanity had clung to him after her rescue. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Amelia’s lips twitch in the world’s smallest, briefest smile.
Ottersock tried scowling again but then gave it up with a tired sigh.
He dropped the teaspoon haphazardly onto his desk, causing milky droplets to sprinkle across the mail strewn there, then drank the medicine through a grimace.
“Ugh,” he said, setting down the cup. “Sometimes I think the migraine would be more pleasant than the cure. I—”
He stopped, his eyes growing wide, as a slip of paper began drifting up from his desk.
Hastily snatching it, he looked around the room in bemusement.
“Strange, I didn’t feel a breeze.” Amelia shot Caleb a fleeting, darkly amused glance, and he found himself struck with a desire to kiss her, deeply and passionately, right there in front of their faculty head.
Fortunately, a ripe snort of derisive laughter from Ottersock squelched the impulse.
“It’s a telegram from that fool Dummersby,” the professor said, flapping the slip of paper.
“He says it’s taking longer than expected to assess the Harroway collection, and he wants some students sent up to help him.
As if one man’s antiques require so much work!
I’m guessing you all spent your time hiking and picnicking and playing parlor games. ”
“No, Professor,” Amelia answered primly, but Ottersock just scoffed at this.
“You are hardly a trustworthy source, Tarrant. Professor Throckmorton telegraphed me days ago to say you’d been flirting with Sir Nigel. I know you can’t help yourself, being female, but I confess myself disappointed.”
Caleb’s jaw dropped, preventing him from coming to Amelia’s immediate defense. She, however, just gazed beyond Ottersock’s shoulder with a calm that made her appear like marble, pure and untouched by human concerns.
“At least we have the locket,” Ottersock continued, huffing through his bushy whiskers. “I’ll send it over to the museum just as soon as I…”
His voice drifted off, and his eyes grew so dreamy it was obvious he was enjoying a vision in which he placed strands of their hair inside the locket and threw the whole thing into the Thames River. Then another piece of mail floated up from the desk, fluttering imperatively, and he snatched it.
“Huh, it’s from you, Tarrant. Postmarked ‘Staveley.’ ” He looked questioningly at Amelia, even as Caleb did the same, but she continued to stare into the middle distance.
Her face had turned white—and yet in every other respect she retained that cold, inhuman calm.
For the first time in all the years he’d known her, Caleb finally understood that it was not a defense but a prison.
It kept her from being herself in a way that might incur the disapproval of her parents and teachers.
“I thought I had destroyed that letter,” she said impassively. “I must have burned another by accident.”
“What does it say?” Caleb and Ottersock asked together, although with different tones of wariness.
“By all means, open it,” Amelia told them.
Caleb watched with a growing sense of dread as Ottersock tore the envelope and withdrew its contents. No doubt Amelia had merely sent a dutiful report about their work’s progress at Ravenscroft Manor…
But his instincts knew that she had not.
Ottersock’s eyebrows lowered in a preemptive frown as he unfolded the letter, then suddenly shot up like a pair of electrified sheep. “You resign?!” he shouted.
“You resign?!” Caleb echoed, staring at Amelia in astonishment.
“I do,” she replied tranquilly.
Caleb opened his mouth…then closed it again.
He was beyond words. He could not even see words on the farthest horizon.
Amelia resigning did not in itself surprise him; she’d talked about it before, after all, and had a job offer from a German university, should she wish to take it.
The timing was also understandable, since she’d written that letter sometime during the past week, on an assignment that would have made even the steadiest person want to quit—obviously, considering the most steady person in England had just done so.
What he failed to comprehend was that she’d written it without telling him.
“Why?” Ottersock demanded, shaking the letter at Amelia. She did not flinch, but she did blink rather heavily, and it was all Caleb could do not to grab Ottersock’s hand to stop him. “Why? Why would you do this?”
Amelia smiled. But it was a faint, poignant smile, and Caleb’s heart plunged into the very pit of his being, a darkness wherein he’d buried memories of his father’s death, and hungry nights, and the day he was almost expelled from school because a teacher caught him reading her volume of Charles Baudelaire’s erotic poetry.
He recognized a pivotal moment when he saw one.
“I’m resigning,” Amelia said, “because I love—”
“Stop,” Caleb said, clutching her arm before he knew what he was doing. It was hardly the action of a man who supposedly hated her, and yet he found himself unable to let her go, even as Ottersock looked on with a rapidly darkening glower.
Amelia turned her smile to him. She was beautiful, beautiful; she was everything to him.
Just the sight of her transformed a world with slums and rotting stables into an absolute paradise.
Caleb wondered dimly, rather desperately, if he should go down on his knees to her right then and there—the same thing he wondered every single time he looked into those midnight eyes, that face like moonlight.
But Amelia took his hand gently and eased it away from her arm.
“I’m resigning,” she said, “because I love me.”
Then just like that, she turned and walked away.
—
Amelia went home. Two students and a fellow professor attempted to waylay her, each of them in possession of some urgent problem only she could solve, but Amelia just smiled, shook her head, and kept going.