Chapter Seven
Longitude tells you your relative position,
much the same as longing does.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
A warm bath restored Elodie to good humor, and after she donned an old, comfortable white dress and brown cardigan, she tied back the sides of her washed hair with the elastic band Gabriel had given her, leaving the soft, rippling length to fall down her back so it might dry before bedtime. Then she unfurled the extra mattress, setting a nightgown atop it as a claim marker.
“So there,” she said, hands on hips and smug smile tilting her mouth—then blushed at having spoken to an empty room. Really, she’d not behaved in such a juvenile manner since…Well, perhaps better not to answer that, lest memories from last month, when she dropped a water bomb on the dean of Merton College, come to mind. Instead she quickly took herself off downstairs.
The inn’s taproom looked like something from one of the adventure novels about smugglers that Elodie had read as a child at the back of slow-moving carts while her parents traveled around Europe, studying its magical geography. She paused in the doorway, clasping her hands before her heart in an old gesture of wonderment that adulthood had never been completely able to eradicate (probably because she was really still just a dreaming twelve-year-old inside).
Smoky, roseate firelight swayed over the rugged stone walls and flashed against a collection of mugs hanging from the low ceiling beams. Wood-framed paintings of old schooners on wild seas and medieval knights fighting dragons in oak forests lured her imagination into a thrilling jumble of stories she set aside for indulging later that night, before sleep. Several tourists sat at hefty tables about the room, eating food that smelled of grease and murmuring together with something like the same wonder Elodie felt. Kerosene lamps illuminated the curious glances several of them were casting at Gabriel, who sat alone at a table in a corner. He had bathed and dressed in a downstairs washroom and now veritably gleamed as he busied himself writing in a notepad, several maps spread across the table before him.
Wearing his spectacles, and clad in a crisp white shirt and dark tie beneath a knitted vest and brown tweed jacket, he presented the quintessential image of male professorship; indeed, he looked like he might at any moment stand up and announce a surprise exam. On the other hand, a damp fringe of hair lying over his brow made him appear young and really rather sweet. Elodie felt herself smile wistfully as she remembered brushing that fringe away from his eyes while they lay together, gazing quietly at each other, after consummating their marriage. It had been damp then too, since he’d put himself to quite a degree of exercise. He’d stiffened a little at the touch of her fingers, as if tenderness disconcerted him, and she’d snatched her hand back, anxious that she’d ruined the mood. He’d muttered something about sleeping and turned onto his back…but one second later he’d gathered her against his side, holding her warmly, protectively, and giving her hope that their marriage might prove true after all…
“Ha!”
The sudden laugh from one of the tourists drew Elodie out of her rueful memories. Gabriel looked up over the rim of his spectacles with a glare that instantly incinerated “sweet” and stamped on the ashes. His attention began to shift toward Elodie, and she realized she was gazing at him, her hands still clasped together, her expression hopelessly doting. Turning away before he caught her at it, she strode over to the bar.
Algernon stood there, chatting to Tegan Parry while the young woman poured him a mug of beer. “Oh yes, getting a university education was an absolute for me, considering my intellect,” he was saying. “ Cobio, ergo sum. ”
“You’re a small fish?” Elodie asked, smiling teasingly as she came up next to him. Then she turned the smile to Tegan. “May I have a cup of tea, please?”
“Of course, Mrs. Doctor, ma’am.”
“Please, call me Elodie.”
The girl blinked confusedly at this casual obliteration of social convention. “As you wish, Mrs. Doctor Elodie, ma’am. Um…would your husband like a different table, perhaps…?”
Elodie looked over her shoulder at Gabriel, who had set his hands against the edge of the table and was jostling it as he frowned at first one of its legs then another, trying to locate the source of some minuscule imbalance. “He’s fine,” she said. “He’s just having fun with geometry.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard those two words used in the same sentence,” Tegan said wryly. “Mind you, I’m not very smart when it comes to math. If I can’t count something on my fingers, I’m out of the equation.”
Elodie grinned, thinking the girl was probably more clever than she gave herself credit for. “Archimedes believed that mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty,” she said, then glanced at Gabriel again. How many women, she wondered, had approached her husband for the sake of his beauty? Had he told any of them the secrets behind his lovely dark eyes?
“Hey!” Algernon exclaimed.
The aggrieved cry jolted Elodie, and she realized that she’d taken the beer mug Tegan had just set on the bar and downed almost half of its contents in one long swallow. Going abruptly still, she looked over the rim at Jennings’s indignant stare and Tegan’s smirk. Her dignity turned its face to the wall and wept.
“Sorry,” she murmured, sheepishly passing the mug to Algernon, then wiping foam from her mouth with the back of her hand as he continued to stare at her. “Long day, half-asleep.”
“I didn’t think ladies drank beer,” Algernon muttered, bringing out a handkerchief from his vest pocket to wipe the mug’s rim with an attitude so passively aggressive it was a wonder the glass didn’t break.
“Mrs. Doctor Elodie isn’t a lady, she’s a scientist,” Tegan argued, possibly in Elodie’s defense. “I wish I could be a scientist.” She sighed, clutching a damp dishcloth to her heart wistfully.
“Why can’t you?” Elodie asked.
Tegan scoffed. “A girl like me, go to university? I don’t think so!”
“If you study hard and obtain good grades, there’s no reason why you can’t. It’s true you will need a large amount of money, and you may face some prejudice regarding your gender—and class—and Welsh nationality…and I was going somewhere helpful with this, I’m sure…”
She winced, all too aware of her own privilege as the child of rich and well-connected geographer parents. In her youth, she’d soaked up the stories and theories of Paul Vidal de La Blache when he came to dinner. Sir Richard Burton had taught her how to determine the source of a river. When she applied to university, her greatest stress had been in choosing between Oxford, with its excellent science department, or her mother’s alma mater, the Sorbonne, which sent her a magnificent wine and cheese basket as an enticement. Yet even with all that privilege, she’d been forced to make her career an ongoing demonstration that possessing a uterus did not preclude one from a talent for geography. And here she was even now, being called Mrs. Doctor Tarrant by a girl whom she wanted to convince that science was a reasonable feminine pursuit.
Of course, the real truth about women in higher education went deeper than gender concerns and class privilege. “I think,” she said slowly, carefully, “that when the path is difficult, one must draw upon—”
“Inner strength,” Tegan intoned wearily.
“All the available scholarships,” Elodie corrected her.
The girl sighed again, half agony, half hope. Elodie tried to think of how else she might encourage her, but was distracted by a sudden gust of wind slamming against the building. Windows rattled, and an eerie blue luster infused the lamplight, flashing here and there with the memory of hill magic before dissipating.
Elodie straightened, instantly alert. She looked around, but none of the tourists seemed to have noticed anything untoward: they were admiring a set of crystals “guaranteed to light up in the presence of magic or your money back.” Tegan had turned away to prepare the tea, and Algernon squinted into his beer as if girl germs now floated in it. Only Gabriel scanned the room in the same way she had, his expression tense as he watched the last glint of blue-tinged thaumaturgic energy flicker away. The atmosphere reverted to one of warm coziness, as if the squall had never occurred—and yet, beneath the cheerful crackle of firelight and the plump, slumbery shadows, Elodie sensed that the evening was poised at the edge of trouble, grinning wickedly with a promise to jump.
The best gauge of thaumaturgic danger is your own intuition, Elodie always told her students. Well, second best to being hit in the head by a flying tree . But the next thing she told them was that it took years of education, and tramping through thaumaturgic minefields, and listening to one’s lecturer—yes, even you, Mr. Hazelcroft in the back row—before that intuition developed into an accurate tool.
Elodie had been honing hers for her entire life.
“Come on, lad, let’s go sit down,” she said briskly to Algernon, then crossed the room without awaiting a reply. But the young man hurried ahead of her, claiming a chair opposite Gabriel and shuffling it so there wasn’t enough space for Elodie to sit comfortably next to him. She hesitated—
And suddenly Gabriel was on his feet, pulling out the chair beside his own. Taken by surprise, Elodie had no flippant remark immediately to hand, and could only murmur a quiet thanks as she lowered herself into the chair. Gabriel pushed it in with expert timing, and thus Elodie found herself rendered safely seated, perfectly aligned with the table, and with nothing to do but calm her heartbeat as Gabriel returned to his chair mere inches from her.
Eight inches, her professional brain estimated, then ran off screaming. Although this morning she’d been in the man’s actual embrace , somehow sitting alongside each other at a table, like a normal married couple , felt even more thrilling , and any good sense she possessed dissolved completely into italics. Her awareness of his presence was so intensely physical , the tiny hairs on her arms shivered. His scent, clean and masculine, layered through her breathing until every inhalation seemed erotic, making her wish quite desperately for a fan. And as he brushed an infinitesimal speck off the table, her muscles clenched, imagining him sweeping those strong fingers across her bare skin .
She began to harbor serious doubts that she’d be able to think straight again, let alone eat dinner.
Algernon, however, suffered no such trouble. Taking up the card that supplied the inn’s menu, he exclaimed happily, “Excellent! Boiled potatoes!”
“You noticed the thaumaturgical flash?” Elodie managed to ask Gabriel, albeit without looking at him.
“Yes,” he answered, not looking at her either. He began rolling up the maps, returning them to their leather cases. Elodie watched as if mesmerized. His hands were geographer’s hands, calloused, marked here and there with tiny scars from scraping against rocks and being bitten by enchanted wildflowers. In contrast, the cuff of his shirt, peeking out from beneath his jacket sleeve, was so pristine it seemed to shine against his olive-toned skin. How could a glimpse of plain linen be erotic? Elodie did not know but would rather like to make a physical study of the matter—in the name of science, of course.
“Are you hungry?” someone inquired, and she had to admit herself indeed more hungry than it seemed respectable to be, metaphorically speaking. Then she realized Tegan was standing beside their table with a handful of cutlery. The girl had set down a cup of tea while Elodie was woolgathering (or wool-removing, more accurately: she’d got most of Gabriel’s suit off him before her imagination had been interrupted), and she reached for it gratefully. If anything could civilize her thoughts, it was tea.
“I could really do with a banger in a bun,” Algernon said, and Elodie nearly dropped the cup.
“Sorry,” Tegan said, “no sausages today.”
Algernon sniffed with disappointment. “What’s the hearty stew?”
“Mutton.”
“Ugh. What about the country pie?”
“Mutton.”
“And the—”
“Mutton.”
Algernon sighed peevishly. Gabriel snatched the menu from him and passed it to Elodie.
“Um, thank you,” she said, setting down her cup on the table, there being no room in her brain just now for such ephemera as tea saucers. She took the menu, looked unseeing at it, said “mutton pie” at random, and handed it back to Gabriel.
He put it down without a glance. “Three servings of pie, please, and some boiled potatoes for Mr. Jennings. Thank you.”
“I’ll bring them now in a minute,” Tegan said, and placed knives and forks before each of them before hurrying off.
“Is that the Geographic Paranormal Survey of D?lylleuad?” Elodie asked before her thoughts could degenerate once more. She nodded at the last remaining map on the table.
“Yes,” Gabriel said, bringing out a handkerchief in order to polish his cutlery. “I’ve been making notes about the potential hazards in the immediate zone, should there be a farther outburst from the fey line. The angle of the riverbank protects D?lylleuad from flooding, and the hills are far enough distant that there’s no threat to the village from possible landslides should a thaumaturgic disturbance result in earthquakes. Liquefaction does remain a concern, although as to that…”
“The graveyard is not on the line,” Elodie said.
“Exactly.” He tapped a finger against a red dot on the map. “Here is the trove, located inside an ancient mine approximately one mile, five hundred and eighty yards outside the village. And this is what I calculated the trajectory of this afternoon’s thaumaturgic energy stream to be.” He traced a newly drawn pencil line from D?lylleuad’s graveyard southward, passing some six hundred yards west of the charted fey line.
“It wasn’t an unsurprising divergence,” Elodie said. “The adjacent fields are no doubt waterlogged due to the recent storms, creating anaerobic soil conditions, which don’t easily conduct thaumaturgic energy. Subterranean movement of mineral-infused water could induce not only an overflow of the fey line, but also intermittent intensities, such as the lightning that destroyed your umbrella.”
“Hm,” Gabriel responded.
“Excuse me, what did you just say?” Algernon asked, agog.
Elodie gave him a gentle smile. “Sorry, I suppose that was all rather technical. Allow me to explain about anaerobic—”
“I don’t care about anaerobic,” he interrupted. “I care about the destroyed umbrella! Do you know how much it costs to make a Weather Mitigation Device?”
Elodie’s smile wavered with bemusement. “Professor Tarrant used that umbrella to harness lightning—”
“Good God!” Algernon turned to Gabriel, who was frowning at a speck on his fork’s handle. “How could you be so reckless with a valuable piece of equipment?!”
“An umbrella is not worth more than a man’s life, Mr. Jennings,” Elodie said.
The young accountant sniffed. “I couldn’t comment on that without first reading his insurance policy.”
Elodie laughed. “Geography wouldn’t be an adventure if we had life insurance.”
“So says the woman who decided to catch magical fire with her bare hands,” Gabriel remarked, setting aside the fork as if it were contaminated.
Algernon gasped. “Are you both completely reckless? Training specialist geographers is an expensive endeavor!” He jabbed his butter knife toward Elodie in emphasis. “Should anything happen to either of you, the cost to the Home Office would be significant! I will be writing this up in my—”
He stopped mid-rant as Gabriel grabbed his hand. With a gasp of mingled fear and outrage, his mouth fell open.
Wordlessly, Gabriel removed the knife from his possession, placed it on the table, and then returned to polishing his own cutlery. “How much would it cost if anything happened to you?” he asked in a mild, conversational tone.
Algernon closed his mouth without an answer, having apparently, albeit belatedly, discovered the profit of silence.
“We will inspect the trove first thing tomorrow,” Gabriel went on as if the interruption had not occurred. “With this much thaumaturgic activity, it has clearly been damaged. After effecting repairs, we need to trace the line to check for any exposure of lesser deposits. We also need to evaluate hazards and make an action plan for the follow-up team. It’s going to be a long day. Both of you be ready to leave at dawn.”
Elodie’s nerves, which had been twinkling after his display of manly protectiveness, now twanged with irritation as he crossed the line into manly arrogance. “Again I remind you about not making unilateral decisions,” she said.
“I assumed you would sensibly agree with me, therefore I abbreviated the conversation for everyone’s convenience.”
“You assumed wrong,” she informed him, chin in the air and eyes overbright, a pose that had made more than one gentleman professor tremble within his dusty tweed suit.
Gabriel, however, returned her look imperturbably, not the slightest tremble in evidence. “Are you admitting to not being sensible, Professor Tarrant?”
“Are you admitting to making an unscientific assumption, Professor Tarrant?” she replied.
Oblivious to their hot-eyed staring, and to the growing tension that felt almost as dangerous as a flash of wild magic, Algernon whined, “Dawn? Can’t we go at a more civilized hour?”
“Thaumaturgic energy does not flow by the clock,” Gabriel told him without looking away from Elodie.
“Unless it’s the Exeter Cathedral clock,” Elodie added, and broke their stare at last to smile at Algernon. “When they repaired it a few years ago, they used materials from Ecton Hill, a level three trove. As a result, when the clock reached the hour, it chimed three verses of ‘God Save the Queen’—at least, it did until the locals were driven so mad by this, they damaged the bell. Now it just chimes ‘God,’ which I suppose is appropriate for a cathedral.”
A moment of silence followed this absolutely fascinating interjection, then Algernon asked, “What if it’s still raining?”
Gabriel gave him a dark, uncompromising look. “Then you get wet.”
Tegan arrived with their food, and thereafter dinner was undertaken in an ambience so uncomfortable as to be practically a parent-teacher conference. Algernon ate fast, then fled. Left alone, Elodie and Gabriel finished the meal without further word or even a glance at each other. The degree of atmospheric tension between them grew almost painful. Indeed, had Professor Mulgrew, Oxford’s senior meteorologist, been present, he’d have made an enthusiastic study of it (not because he was a meteorologist, but because he gossiped worse than anyone else in the entire university).
As they went upstairs, assisted by lanterns Tegan had given them to illuminate the way, Elodie tried to ease the mood. “I hope Professor Jackson hasn’t touched anything he shouldn’t have out there,” she said with a smile.
“Hm,” Gabriel replied.
The smile promptly stormed off in disgust. “There’s no need to be like that.”
“I’m agreeing with you,” he answered, so pleasantly calm that a woman had no option but to argue.
“Someone needs to teach you how to say yes nicely,” she snapped.
“Saying yes is a dangerous thing.” He looked over his shoulder at her with such intensity, Elodie almost stumbled. Clearly he was talking about his wedding vows, and all of a sudden she longed to take a divorce decree and whack him over the head several times with it. Instead, she glared, although to no avail, since he’d looked away again.
“Sod,” Elodie muttered under her breath. And as if to concur, an icy draft swirled through the corridor. It agitated the flames of the lanterns, and although it failed to cool the furious heat currently burning great holes in Elodie’s dignity, she shivered a little nevertheless, pulling the sides of her cardigan together. A scent of wild, damp magic moldered the air. They might have been walking through a moonless autumn forest that leaned, yearning and sighing in every bough, toward an old river. They might have been lost in a dream. Elodie drew slowly to a halt, the argument with Gabriel forgotten as all her senses began prickling with curiosity.
Somehow, between one moment and the next, the night had turned gothic, as if danger (for example, a necromancer, monster, or university constable who wanted to know why you were climbing out a library window) lurked behind one of the doors in the corridor. The darkness whispered to her with eerie wistfulness.
“Elodie?”
She blinked, pulling herself out of the strange reverie, and discovered that Gabriel had turned back to her again. The way he spoke her name was not at all wistful; indeed, he’d obviously been saying it for some time. He ducked his head to look closely in her eyes, and as lantern light burnished his face, it made the mild frown lining his brow seem broodingly solemn.
“What?” she answered spikily, even as her heart melted into old romantic wishes that could never come true.
His frown tilted deeper. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. Tired.”
Gabriel looked doubtful. He lifted a hand as if he would touch her face, and Elodie suspended all operations of her respiratory system.
The darkness of his eyes grew heavier. “Violets,” he murmured. The tips of his fingers almost, almost brushed against her hair, and Elodie realized he must be referring to the fragrance of her soap. “Hm,” he said.
Then he lowered the hand, turning once more toward the bedroom, and Elodie expelled a frustrated sigh.
“Considering your diminished state,” he said with his regular dispassionate timbre as he walked, “it’s important you get a comfortable night’s sleep. We don’t want you struggling on the job tomorrow. Therefore you will take the bed and I the mattress.”
“Diminished—?!” Every romantic wish promptly vanished from Elodie’s heart. “Struggle?!” she sputtered, hurrying after him. “I recommend that you take the bed, so if I get up in the night, I do not accidentally step on your face.”
Although his back was to her, she would guarantee that he’d raised an eyebrow. “Threatening violence against one’s team leader is a strong indication of impaired reasoning.”
“Delusions that one is the team leader also indicate impaired reasoning,” she rebutted.
“You are exhausted. Take the bed.”
“You are obnoxious. I’m sleeping on the floor.”
They arrived at the bedroom and stopped.
“Oh,” Elodie said, staring at the door, which stood ajar. “I could have sworn I closed that.”
“Uh-huh,” Gabriel replied in a noncommittal manner that nevertheless conveyed wholehearted commitment to the idea of Elodie wandering out the door, deep in thought about rain or dinner or something completely random, such as Australian marsupial habitats— Ooh, I wonder what they are, she thought. I’ll have to ask someone from the animal biology department —and thus forgetting to secure the room behind her. Only the fact that he was probably right stopped her from chastising him.
“After you,” she said with a stiff gesture.
“Certainly not,” Gabriel replied. “As previously established, ladies first.”
Elodie almost insisted, but the look he gave her conveyed a willingness to stand there all night, exchanging politeness like arrows until she finally surrendered. So, with one final supercilious glare, she swept past him into the room.
Gabriel followed, and as he closed the door behind them, the entire world shrank down to one small chamber and the stark fact that they’d soon be undressing and lying down to sleep in the company of their wedded spouse worst enemy. Holding up their lanterns, they stared with mutual silence at the mattress on the floor.
And at the goat that was industriously eating it.