“Department employees must comport themselves professionally at department meetings, or so I’ve been asked to tell you,” Fletcher said, settling behind her desk.
“Yes.” Emily shuffled her feet, hands shaking. “I’m really very sorry.”
Then Fletcher—unsmiling, pinched-looking Fletcher—leaned back in her seat and laughed so hard her shoulders shook.
“Oh, Lord,” she said finally, expression transformed into something positively mischievous. “That was the best meeting I’ve ever been in.”
Emily opened her mouth, decided no response could possibly be adequate and closed it.
“Listen,” Fletcher said, grin fading. “I know your schedule is rotten. I wish I could fix it for you, but I can’t. All I can offer is a bit of advice: The only lecturer who turned a contract job into a tenure-track position here had excellent feedback from students and several published articles.”
Emily sighed. A rework of her thesis was scheduled to appear in a minor journal within a few months, butthat was it so far. Her in-progress paper about Enlightenment magic and gender was half-researched at best, thanks to her punishing schedule. Well, okay, that and the time eaten up on current-day magic and Hartgrave.
She returned to the Inferno in the afternoon, her bag now overflowing with exams, which she intended to zip through so she could take Fletcher’s advice to “get cracking.” But she couldn’t help pausing when she saw Bernie. He sat slumped on his couch, surrounded (and partially covered) by essays, and he looked thoroughly disgruntled. He wasn’t even wearing a hat.
“I have to stop being such an entertaining lecturer,” he groused. “Do you know I have forty students in my intro to medieval lit course? Forty! A specialty in medieval literature ought to ensure minimal interest from the masses.”
“You’re teachingtwoclasses. I have zero sympathy for you.”
“Oh? Do you know that one of my so-called students defines the first circle of Dante’s Inferno as ‘punishment via an eternity of limboing’?”
She laughed.
“Or,” he said, thwapping an essay in his lap, “that I counted three different spellings of ‘Chaucer’ in this thing, two of them in the same paragraph?”
“I’ll see your misspellings and raise you an assertion that Alaska is an island south of California. Would have made the gold rush a lot more convenient.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “You don’t know awful until you’ve read last-minute literary analysis. Considerthe sophomore who repurposed a paper on Moby-Dick to discuss the King Arthur legend.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll bite. How do you know it used to be a paper about Moby-Dick?”
“He called Cornwall ‘a symbol of good, evil and the dying whaling industry.’”
She gasped.
“I know,” Bernie said, misunderstanding her shock. “What’s worse, until that sentence it was actually a pretty good essay.”
She stumbled back to her office, mind whirling. Cornwall. How could she have forgotten that the English county where Hartgrave earned his degree was also the supposed birthplace of King Arthur? It couldn’t be a coincidence. Cornwall, King Arthur,Merlin. That had to be why Hartgrave moved there.
Except why would he leave?
As soon as she graded the last exam, she re-read two King Arthur books—guiltily, knowing she needed every free minute to work on her academic research. (Perhaps she could shoehorn King Arthur in? The legend was stillrelevantin the Enlightenment ...)
The books offered no clues, unless she was supposed to see parallels between Hartgrave in his underground lair and Merlin sealed up in a cave by the witch Nimue. So she turned to Bernie, but none of his tidbits seemed pertinent.
After that, she could do nothing but ask the one person with answers. She didn’t expect Hartgrave would give her any, not if they had something to do with his strange fear of being connected with Cornwall, but anangry no-comment would prove she was on the right track.
To her disappointment, her question about Merlin—asked the first day after his question-free week—didn’t provoke so much as an irritably raised eyebrow.
“I’ve no idea if he really existed,” Hartgrave said. “I’m only thirty, you know.”
“Well—do you think he did?”
“Why do you think I’ve wasted any time thinking of him at all? Other than right now.”
She tsked. “Because he’s an allegedly great wizard—oh come on,” she added as he scowled at the word, “he wouldn’t have called himself a ‘convincer’—and you could learn things from someone like that.”
“Daggett, give me one example of a practical hands-on reference to magic and I’ll eat my hat.”
