Chapter Twenty-Three
They say home is where the heart is, but in truth
it’s where the food is. But, by God, you can
have a lot of heart for a good potato!
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
“The whole world sighed dreamily” was in fact what Gabriel would have more sensibly described as “a rising wind.” It swept over Oxford, promising rain. This was a disaster for young gentlemen who had finally got their hair looking perfect before meeting girls on a dinner date, but felt pleasantly refreshing to Elodie as she and Gabriel made their way back into the city, the undergraduate jogging alongside the velocipede with his arms full of priceless, albeit rather ragged, historic documents.
Proceeding to the police station on High Street, they called an end to Protocol D (much to the bemusement of the sergeant in charge, who’d never got the message in the first place), then requisitioned the station telegraph to send messages to towns and cities up-line. A dinner of sandwiches was brought in, the kettle boiled, and by the time news started arriving from Wales, they were half-asleep, leaning against each other on the scratchy old sofa in the sergeant’s office.
“Only mild earthquakes,” Elodie said with satisfaction as they considered the stack of telegrams.
“And that one rain of frogs in Much Marcle,” Gabriel added.
“Yes, but that could have been just a regular, everyday rain of frogs. Most importantly, a complete squelching of the trove in D?lylleuad.” Elodie grinned as she tapped a finger against the telegram from the village. “The secondary team made excellent time in getting there. And with Dr. Ngoma in charge, I feel confident in their assurance that the line has stabilized. They’ve even convinced Professor Jackson to go home.”
“Home,” Gabriel said, frowning with what a casual observer would have called irritation but that Elodie knew was longing. Shadows lay beneath his eyes, and she’d even noticed him add sugar to his last cup of tea. The man was nearly done in. Setting aside the telegrams, she took his hand.
“Come with me, husband.”
“Always, wife,” he replied, awkward but clearly prepared to take a good stab at being romantic, for her sake. Elodie’s heart melted. Besides, what he lacked in conversational flirtation he made up for in his silence: the look he gave her was so hot, Elodie went from melting to steaming.
They rose together from the sofa, still hand in hand, and moved toward the office door, not once taking their eyes off each other (as a consequence of which Elodie bumped into the sofa’s edge and Gabriel knocked against a side table, sending a teacup clattering from its saucer). Elodie reached for the door handle…
“I know they’re here!”
They stopped, eyes growing wide. “Oh my God,” Elodie whispered. “It’s Professor Slummery!”
How the head of the geography department had tracked them to the police station was anyone’s guess, but Elodie personally suspected that supernatural telepathy was a skill possessed by university department heads everywhere.
“Almost running over a professor!” the man was shouting. “Sending drunken geographers to harass the observatory staff! And I’ve had Hereford Cathedral’s archivist on the telephone all afternoon! Tell me where they are, Constable!”
“Quick!” Elodie whispered, tugging Gabriel across the room. “We’ll go out the window!”
“Why?” Gabriel asked, perplexed. “Can’t we just talk to him? He’ll be glad to see us; we did after all save the city.”
Elodie paused in unlatching the window to cast him a panicked look. “Well, you see—”
“And while I’m here,” Slummery could be heard saying, “I want you fellows to find out who stole my brand-new leather chair and suspended it from the cupola of the Radcliffe Camera!”
—
But in the end, Elodie surprised Gabriel by bringing him peace. Clambering out a police station’s window…running through the lamplit rain…hunting among an assortment of potted plants on the stoop of her town house until they found the hidden front door key, never mind that at any moment a student or fellow teacher might walk past and see them…careening through cluttered, unlit rooms while they kissed and kissed and pulled the clothes off each other…it all faded from mind once he was ensconced in the warm tangle of her bedsheets, naked against her lovely soft nakedness.
He’d been exhausted until this moment. He’d yearned for nothing more than sleep. And yet, as Elodie snuggled close, murmuring love and so strong and what sounded suspiciously like Grouchyboo , he felt himself become marvelously reinvigorated. And his body held clear ideas about how to proceed, namely:
(1) Worship her,
(2) Adore her, and
(3) Give her any pleasure she desires.
Free of any deadlines, such as becoming literally dead in a magical explosion, Gabriel was able to luxuriate, and to show Elodie that he too had an imagination. For half an hour he explored every pathway to the destination most beloved of his heart: Elodie’s happiness. Then it was her turn, and he lay quiet, surrendering absolutely, while she made a wide-ranging expedition with lips and fingers around all the sensitive places on his body. Beautiful, she murmured as she went, and delicious , and oh my God no wonder you’re arrogant , until he found himself laughing with joy.
No one had ever before focused on him so exclusively (other than the senior scientists who examined his doctoral thesis, and about whom he did not want to think at this moment), and Gabriel began shifting out of a waking dream of pleasure into something more transcendent. By the time they finally got around to the central element of the activity, no compass could have directed him back to sensibility. All he knew of the world was Elodie beneath him, her smile his polestar. And when they reached their mutual goal with a synchronicity that charmed the last fragment of Gabriel’s brain still operating, he felt as if they were, together, the entire universe. Dark and light, stone and storm, love.
“Oh my goodness,” Elodie gasped as they cuddled afterward. “To think we wasted years when we could have been doing that every day.”
“Not a waste,” Gabriel said, letting bits drop out of the sentence in his dazed tiredness. “You existed—that was always enough for me.”
“First thing tomorrow I’m going to a bookstore,” Elodie said, “and I’m going to buy half a dozen poetry books so I can study how to say such gorgeous things back to you.”
“Third thing tomorrow,” Gabriel corrected her. “First thing, I’m going to make love to you again.”
“Acceptable. And the second thing?” she asked sleepily.
“Actually, that one’s more of a forever thing. I’m going to court you, Elodie. At least insofar as a curmudgeon can. I’m going to move us and this relationship forward.”
“You don’t need to do that, Gabriel,” she said, snuggling up to his warm, slow-beating heart. “I’m right where I where I want to be.”
“Right where you belong,” he grumbled with tetchy arrogance.
Elodie smiled as she drifted asleep.
—
“Professor Tarrant!” Motthers’s voice through the door was unrelenting.
“He means you,” Elodie said, her voice lush with drowsiness. She nudged Gabriel.
“It’s your house,” Gabriel muttered into the pillow.
“Ours,” Elodie grumped, but eventually she clambered out of bed and went to answer Motthers’s incessant knocking.
The graduate student’s eyes grew so big when Elodie opened the door that she experienced a moment of alarm for his health. But then she realized he was trying (and failing miserably) not to stare at her clothing.
“What is it?” she asked with as much politeness as she could muster, despite the hour (which was, in fact, ten o’clock in the morning).
“You’re…you’re wearing a man’s shirt,” Motthers squeaked, painfully squinting at said item of clothing, or perhaps the bare legs beneath it, not even a mismatched pair of stockings covering them. Elodie just looked at him steadily, since students who knock on their professor’s door at an ungodly hour (again, it was halfway to noon) deserved all they got. Motthers blinked, recollecting himself—and more importantly, the fact that Elodie was his superior. “Sorry, Professor. I meant, there’s been a disaster !”
“Another one?” Elodie asked wearily.
“I’m afraid so. In Leicester. Thaumaturgic bogs spontaneously combusting all throughout the city.”
“Can’t someone else go?” Elodie yawned as she pushed back the tumult of her hair. She did not want to be traipsing through Leicester today, with or without bogs. She had plans , and they were decidedly more horizontal than that. (Well, mostly horizontal. After all, Elodie had a very good imagination.)
“Sorry, Professor,” Motthers said, holding up a telegram like a shield for his eyes. “An accountant from the Home Office…” He squinted at the telegram. “Mr. Jennings…is trapped in one of the bogs, and he specifically demanded Professor Tarrant’s help.”
“Oh dear, poor Algie,” Elodie said, trying not to laugh.
“Did he say which Professor Tarrant?” came a grumbled voice behind her. Elodie glanced over her shoulder to see Gabriel crossing the room in trousers, a jumper, and bare feet, his hair mussed. Mussed! She felt her heart swell at the sight, and she suspected this was going to be her fate from hereon: to fall in love with her husband over and over again, like a scientist always discovering something newly wondrous about the world.
“It doesn’t matter which one of us, does it?” she told him. “If you go, I go with you.”
“And if you go, I’ll be coming too,” he agreed, frowning.
“Oh my God,” Motthers could be heard muttering queasily. But when Elodie turned back to him, he straightened with all the dignity of someone who hoped to achieve his master’s degree that year, so long as he survived his professor. “Train tickets,” he said, handing over an envelope. “And all the pertinent information.”
Elodie thanked him and went to shut the door. But then she stopped, pinning Motthers with a gaze so sharp, his mustache quivered.
“Before I left for Wales, you tried to warn me of a problem. What was it?”
“Oh.” The young man glanced at Gabriel, terrified, and then his expression loosened into abject surrender. “Some Merton students (not me, of course!) had a wager going about your marriage. And some of them—who are now very, very sorry—” He glanced again at Gabriel and winced. “ So very sorry —might have unadvisedly bet their entire funding for the coming year. Because of this, I wanted to tell you, ‘Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with your husband.’?”
He cringed as if she were about to slap him with the train tickets. Elodie closed her eyes. Behind her, Gabriel laughed.
Then they shut the student out and, together, headed off for another disaster.