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 verysmart 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 wishIcould 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 reasonwhy 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 calledMrs.Doctor Tarrant by a girl whom she wanted to convince that science was a reasonable feminine pursuit.
Of course, therealtruth 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, butnone 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 withnothing 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’sactual embrace, somehow sitting alongside each other at a table,like a normal married couple, felteven more thrilling, and any good sense she possessed dissolvedcompletelyinto italics. Her awareness of his presence wasso 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 wishquite desperatelyfor a fan. And as he brushed an infinitesimal speck off the table, her muscles clenched, imagininghim 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!”
