Tegan Parry was standing on the doorstep, surrounded by a nimbus of fresh morning sunlight. “Ah, there you are, Mr. Jennings,” she said, smiling. “I’ve spoken to Mrs. Jones. She’s about to leave for Aberystwyth and is happy to take you in her carriage.”
Algernon shook his head with such vehemence there appeared some danger of his mustache falling off. “No, no, I, you, oh dear, such a, um, misunderstanding, ha ha.”
“Fortes fortuna juvat, Mr. Jennings,” Gabriel said sternly. And when he received a blank look in response: “Fortune favors the brave. At the very least, dare a proper sentence.”
“If you want to go home, you should,” Elodie said with gentle sympathy. “We won’t mind.”
Algernon turned to her, his expression lifting into delight. “What, really?” Then he glanced at Gabriel, and it plummeted again. “I mean, no! In the middle of a disaster? Good God, woman, are you insane?”
Abruptly, Gabriel took a step forward. “Don’t speak to my wife like that.”
Algernon flushed, but it was a mere watercolor wash compared to the crimson brightness that lit Elodie’s face. Indeed, she could have been propped against a headland to warn ships about sunken reefs.
“S-sorry,” Algernon stammered, throat bobbing.
It’s fine,Elodie wanted to assure him, but all her words had dissolved into stars.
Gabriel flicked a finger at the doorway. “Time to go.”
“Go?” Algernon repeated, the word freighted with hope, fear, uncertainty.
“To move from one place to another,” Gabriel said. “In this instance, from the inn to the trove on the fey line. We may need your assistance, Mr. Jennings, therefore you are staying. Or rather, you are going. With us.Now.”
“Can I come too?”
They all turned to find one of the tourists, Mr. Mumbers, standing behind them. “Do say yes!” he begged enthusiastically. “My phrenologist has advised me to get more excitement in life, for the sake of my health, and you people are the most exciting thing I’ve encountered in a long while. I ‘could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.’ ” He directed a beguiling grin at Elodie, and she laughed.
“You need to broaden your horizons,” she advised the youngman dryly. Beside her, Gabriel muttered something under his breath about him also needing to learn the definition of “jocund,” but Mr. Mumbers ignored this.
“Then I can come?” the young man asked, bouncing a little on his heels. “I’m all prepared!” He patted the small, gold-plated pair of binoculars that hung about his neck, and that were so elegantly dainty, they probably wouldn’t see a tree five feet in front of them.
Gabriel’s irritation, however, was impossible to miss. “N—”
“Sure,” Elodie said, shrugging. “The more the merrier.”
“May I remind Dr. Tarrant that we will be entering a classified location?” Gabriel intoned.
“You may,” Elodie answered, then gestured for Mumbers to precede her. She would have handed over the key to Queen Victoria’s bedroom if it meant yet another person between her and Gabriel. (He said “my wife,”her heart whispered, its hands clasped together and its eyes raised dreamily. Her brain, however, was busy erecting a barricade. It wasn’t that she expected Gabriel to hurt her; rather, she hurt herself with her hopelessly unrequited feelings toward him. Really, feeling attracted to one’s husband was not safe. Best that, as much as possible, they not be alone.)
“Hurrah!” Mumbers enthused. “What fun!”
“This is geography,” Gabriel grumbled as he pushed past everyone and out onto the street. “Funhas nothing to do with it.”
—
Alas, no oneheeded this statement of fact. The thaumaturgic trove was a mere twenty minutes’ distance from Dôlylleuad—but when at the three-quarter mark Gabriel looked at hiswristwatch yet again, he noted they had been walking for thirty-two minutes. Thirty. Two. He could not repress a loudtsk.
“Must you inspect those flowers?” he demanded as Elodie bent rapturously over a tangle of briar roses at the roadside. This was after she had stopped to chat with locals, stopped to greet no fewer than three dogs, stopped to admire what could only be described by reasonable people as a plain blue sky, and actually wandered off the road completely at one point to gather harebells—“magical fairy bells,” she’d called them as she tucked a few into the ramshackle bundle of her hair. As a result, she looked more like a dryad than a scientist, and Gabriel managed to keep his irritation going only with a reminder that the woman presented a hazard to anyone with hay fever. She certainly made it hard for him to breathe.
“Time doesn’t only go forward, it goes deep too,” she answered him now. “I don’t want to just walk down a road, I want toexperienceit. That’s geography for you, Dr. Tarrant.”
Then she tossed him a blithe, sun-spangled grin that had him forgiving her in an instant—at least, until the very next instant, when she stopped to watch a skylark dancing above the long grasses.
Not helping matters was Algernon’s trudging attitude and continual complaints about the road’s sodden condition. While Elodie was gazing birdward, and Mumbers was declaiming, “ ‘Ethereal minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?’ ” the accountant cursed autumn and rubbed his muddy boots against a tuft of weeds. While Elodie veered off for roses and Mumbers followed close behind her, soliloquizing about the sweet prick of thorns, Algernon halted in the middle of the road to pluck raisins out of the lastremaining scone from their breakfast. And just when Gabriel felt himself at the verge of madness, theyallturned to look back at Dôlylleuad.
“Such a bucolic vista,” Elodie said, sighing dreamily as she slid a rose behind one ear.
“It is beautiful indeed,” Mumbers agreed.
