Chapter Twenty-Four
Nothing anticipates the future more
than the past does.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
Six months later
The Minervaeum Club’s duty manager stood near the library door with a fire extinguisher at his side.
Water buckets had been stationed in every corner of the room, and staff carrying thaumometers along with trays of hors d’oeuvres patrolled warily.
Antiquarians had gathered in the library to celebrate the opening of the Harroway’s Household Wonders!
exhibition at the British Museum, and frankly, no amount of precautions could be enough.
Tweedy scholars and curators milled about in the dusty lamplight, slowly killing themselves with pipe smoke and arguing in mild, professional tones as to whether the exclamation point on the exhibition’s title was undignified or not.
Sir Nigel Harroway himself had been invited as a special guest, and every few minutes someone approached him with congratulations, only to discover that the man was the academic version of sticky fly paper.
From a safe zone just beyond Sir Nigel’s line of sight, Mr. Dummersby watched his horrified peers endeavor to escape becoming acquainted with the minute details surrounding each thaumaturgic item in the exhibit.
At the start of the evening, Oxford’s head of Material History, Professor Ottersock, had floated the idea of bestowing upon Sir Nigel an honorary degree.
Less than an hour later, the professor was consulting train schedules for when he could soonest send the dreadful fellow back to Cumbria.
(Lady Ruperta Harroway had also been invited to the soiree.
She gave her regrets, being unfortunately too busy taking in an opera show, shopping at Harrods, touring royal sites, and making an overnight trip to Paris, where she met a fascinating and beautiful artist who offered her a life of thrilling romance and adventure, which Lady Ruperta declined on account of said artist being middle-class.)
At a table in one corner of the library, beside a window that glinted with rain, a young woman in white lace sat drinking tea. Every now and again she looked out at the crowd with an expression of vague amusement. None of the gentlemen dared to meet her eye.
“Who is that lovely creature?” a graduate student from America whispered to Dummersby, his eyes alight with fascinated curiosity.
“That is Mrs. Sterling,” Dummersby informed him. “She is an eminent scholar of material history. It’s her public lecture, ‘On the Dental Thaumaturgic Manifestation of a Simulacrum Poltergeistic King John’ that you will be attending tomorrow.”
“Snappy title,” the student remarked.
“Hm.”
“And who’s that sitting beside her? The scowling fellow.”
Dummersby’s eye twitched nervously. “Professor Gabriel Tarrant from Oxford’s geography department,” he said, and clutched his pipe a little tighter. “He’s Mrs. Sterling’s brother. Don’t approach him, whatever you do.”
“That’s Professor Tyrant?” The student whispered the name, taking a cautious half step backward. “We know about him even in Stanford.”
Dummersby sniffed with the apparent disdain of a man who himself wasn’t even known in Cambridge, let alone another country.
“The woman beside him, who appears to be wearing two different earrings, is his wife, Professor Elodie Tarrant. Try to ignore the way they look at each other—such unseemly behavior in public, even if they are geographers!”
“Hm,” said the student in a carefully neutral tone.
“You probably know the others at the table.”
“They’re Professors Pickering and Lockley, aren’t they? The famous orthi—orithno—birders! I wonder if I could get their autographs.”
Before Dummersby could advise him against such a course of action, the library door swung open with an ominous creak.
Silence clamped down on the entire company.
Standing tiptoed for a better view, the student saw a man enter.
This newcomer did not wear proper tweed but instead was clad in a suit so expensive it looked plain.
His hair shone like heavenly gold in the lamplight, as if he were the god Apollo, come for sherry and a chat at the club.
He read a book while walking, and when he turned a page, a bejeweled wedding band glinted on his ring finger.
At the sight of it the student, despite having a fiancée back home, felt an inexplicable regret.
“Sterling!” the crowd chorused.
Looking up, the man blinked in surprise. “Goodness, is it that time of night already? Uh, nice to see you all again, I suppose!”
This was spoken with a good cheer that only barely concealed his obvious dislike, but the majority of the crowd did not seem to realize.
They shuffled forward in the hopes of shaking the hand of the fellow who’d done what each of them secretly dreamed for themselves: leaving academia to become a full-time novelist. But before any could manage it, he slammed shut his book, staring across the room.
Silence clamped down again. As one, every head in the crowd turned.
The woman at the table stared back at Mr. Sterling, her eyes darker than the night outside.
“Oh dear, here we go again,” Dummersby muttered, and puffed his pipe disconcertedly.
—
Amelia watched with trepidation as Caleb approached her. He was grinning…Indeed, his entire walk was like a grin, and the lamplight seemed to glitter around him out of sheer delight for his existence. She began to flutter internally.
“Close your eyes, Gabriel,” she murmured from the corner of her mouth.
“What?” Her brother looked at her with a bemused frown. “Why?”
There was no opportunity for Amelia to provide a further warning, however.
Caleb arrived, and without even so much as a glance at the others around the table, let alone a polite greeting, he cupped Amelia’s chin in one hand.
Tilting her face up, he afforded her one hot, electric second to prepare before he bent and kissed her.
“Ahem.” Gabriel cleared his throat disapprovingly.
Everyone else at the table chuckled, and Amelia thought she heard a charmed “Aww” that was no doubt from Elodie, who tended to see romanticism in a mere handshake and could be relied upon to melt dreamily when anyone in her vicinity actually kissed.
Which was of course a rare occurrence, since this was England, where the general consensus was that expressions of marital affection ought to take place in private.
With the curtains closed. And the doors locked for good measure.
Caleb seemed to be on a one-man crusade to overturn that.
Thankfully, he released Amelia before she (and Mr. Dummersby as well) needed to be checked by a cardiologist. “Hello, wife,” he said, and Amelia blushed as if he’d not taken every opportunity to say that in the past three months since their wedding.
Then he tossed himself into the empty chair beside her and grinned at the others present. “Hello, you lot.”
“Hello,” they replied (except for Gabriel, who said a proper “Good evening”).
“Sorry I’m late, I was chatting to my publisher upstairs in the Shakespeare Lounge.”
“Is that it?” Beth asked excitedly, indicating the book Caleb had placed on the table. “A Regal Love?”
Caleb patted the plain white cover with the kind of wry fondness that comes from having spent months in a complicated relationship with some eighty thousand words.
“Yes. Well, it’s an early copy that I’m editing.
Turns out I’m unconsciously obsessed with the word realize; and you’d think King Edward the First had a nervous tic, considering how often I describe him blinking.
” He gave Beth a warm smile. “It’s nice to see you, sweetheart.
Congratulations on being awarded High Flyer for your presentation on the giant carnivorous moa. ”
“Thank you,” Beth said demurely, although she became luminous with his kindness. “Devon did most of the work, though.”
Her husband scoffed genially. “I just held your parasol—”
“And used it to beat off the smugglers who were trying to capture the moa,” Beth added, with a chiding look in which Amelia could practically see lovehearts. It made her feel like crying happy tears that her cousin Devon was so adored.
Then again, she cried happy tears at breakfast this morning when her first spoonful of porridge was the perfect temperature. And she cried them yesterday too, upon seeing a child skipping on the steps of the British Museum.
It was all Caleb’s fault. And Amelia smiled privately to herself at the thought of telling him so, once she had a doctor confirm what she herself had only recently begun to suspect was the cause of all these wayward emotions.
Laying one hand in an entirely casual, nonsignificant manner on her belly, she reached with her other for the teacup…
And stopped as it trembled in its saucer.
Thud. A book fell off one of the library’s shelves. The floor shook. Looking around with some alarm, academics murmured worriedly to each other through mouthfuls of sardine paté and pipe smoke.
“Earthquake,” Gabriel said with the utmost Tarrant calm. “Interesting.”
Elodie, however, was already on her feet, causing her chair to totter. Gabriel reached out without looking to place a steadying hand on her back. “That’s no normal tremor,” she declared. “Do you see the tint of blue in the air? Magic! I need to get my thaumometer.”
“Wait,” Caleb interjected before she could dash off. “This is all too familiar.” He turned to Amelia with a look of suspicion. “Dearest, would you do me a favor?”
“No,” she answered at once, for she knew what he was going to suggest. The air between them began crackling, and only partly due to the buildup of thaumaturgic energy.
At the end of the table, Beth and Devon glanced at each other nervously.
Elodie sank back into her chair, but slowly, suggesting that she’d rather run for the door.
Gabriel drank tea with the peace that being oblivious to other people’s emotional dramas granted him.
“Meely, really?” Caleb shook his head, the very picture of tragic disappointment. “You promised you’d stop carrying that teaspoon around with you.”
Amelia held herself even more primly erect. “I’m worried Ottersock will try to steal it back,” she explained.
“Ottersock is too busy trying to keep his job as faculty head after losing his two best professors. Hand it over.”
“Certainly not,” Amelia declared with an outrage that, under more private circumstances, would have been a passionate kiss instead.
“Do you mean that teaspoon?” Gabriel asked, pointing to where one lay on the floor beside Amelia’s chair.
Gasping, she reached down to retrieve it.
“It must have slipped out of my pocket,” she said, wincing apologetically.
In all honesty, she ought not to have brought the blasted little Utensil of Chaos (as Caleb had dubbed it) with her tonight—but despite what she’d just said, she’d actually forgotten it was in her pocket.
As she straightened, clutching the silver handle tight in case it slipped away again, she wondered if her constantly forgetting it was part of the magic.
She also had to secretly admit that this was not the first time lately that the teaspoon had fallen to the floor.
Or flown across the room. Or tapped playfully against her desktop for no apparent reason.
The episodes did not appear connected to her own emotional state at the time, and more than once Caleb hadn’t even been in the house.
It was a mystery, for her studies thus far had proven the psycho-conjunctive magic interacted solely with human emotions.
Furthermore, its range did not extend far enough to include neighbors, and no other living soul had been in the house…
Oh dear, she thought, placing an instinctively protective hand on her belly. Had the dratted teaspoon enchanted the baby she suspected she was carrying? Had it created a witch child?
Oops. Caleb was going to be so—well, delighted, probably.
She held out the teaspoon. “I think you should keep hold of this,” she told him soberly. “At least for the next seven months.”
Caleb, reaching to take it, stopped, staring at her with an utterly blank expression.
Amelia looked back at him nervously, heart in her throat.
If in that moment any other person existed in the entire world, let alone the Minervaeum’s library, neither she nor Caleb knew it.
A deeply intimate silence encompassed them, filled with worry—and wonderment—and love, always love.
Slowly, Caleb’s expression transformed like magic into the most beautiful Amelia had ever seen. He reached for her hand.
She remembered him in the shadows so long ago, bringing her sunlight, giving her his handkerchief.
She’d sworn in that moment never to cry again.
Now, as she took his hand and heard the tiny, sweet sound of their wedding rings kissing together, Amelia felt tears once again fill her eyes.
They made the whole world seem filled with silvery magic.
Whoosh!
All of a sudden, the teaspoon flew out of her other hand.
“Aaagghh!” The crowd of academics screamed as flames leaped up from their pipes, instantly setting fire to the ceiling.
Boom! A case of books erupted, toppling large volumes of historic household records onto Dummersby’s head.
With a sigh, the Minervaeum staff rushed for their water buckets (again).