They stood in a silence so comprehensive it could have built a whole new house. Elodie’s heartbeat began accelerating with an instinct for impending disaster. “Now what?” she asked.
Gabriel looked at her warily. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we only married so you could get this house.”
Gabriel grew pale, but his eyes were darker than night as he stared at her. Belatedly realizing how she must have sounded, Elodie rushed to clarify. “I mean, I got what I wanted from our deal, but…”
No, stop!her brain shouted. But it was too late. Gabriel’s expression turned thunderous. Pivoting abruptly, he marched away. Elodie stared after him for a moment, then left in the opposite direction.
And that had been that for their marriage.
—
“Professor!” Motthers squeaked,trying to juggle suitcase, clipboard, backpack, and wits as he hurried after her across the platform. “The train!”
“I won’t be catching it,” Elodie said, walking faster. In the past year since that wedding, general opinion as to her respectability did the opposite of improve; indeed, scurrilous gossip spread beyond the geography department to most of Oxford and even as far as her parents in Shropshire, who declared themselves bemused (but, alas, not entirely surprised) that she would marry a colleague on a sudden whim then abandon both him and her reputation to continue living alone. And Gabriel’s search for accommodation had been completely derailed, since an estranged husband was considered even less reliable a tenant than a bachelor was. All in all, the marriage had turned out tobe very inconvenient indeed. But having no grounds for an annulment, they were stuck with it.
Each blamed the other—or, at least, Elodie initially blamed herself, and wallowed in the depths of guilty despair, but since Gabriel made no effort to persuade her otherwise, she turned quite readily to blaming him. In short order, they moved from beingloverstoenemies. No conversation passed between them other than a few curt greetings when absolutely required, and one particularly fiery verbal skirmish over whether to stock chocolate jumbles or plain digestive biscuits in the faculty tea cupboard.
Furthermore, Elodie learned to be a veritable escape artist, disappearing through doorways, behind hedges, and down stairwells whenever she saw Gabriel; once she even jumped out a first-floor window—the consequences of which to her ankle were luckily healed now, thus enabling her to move at speed across the train platform. Certainly, a master’s student with a flimsy mustache could not stop her.
“But the magic!” Motthers cried.
“Professor Tarrant—the other one—will attend to that. You can join his team.”
“But soil contamination from aeolian transportation of explosively thaumaturgized Neoproterozoic-Cambrian rock particles!”
Elodie’s heart sank.Damn. Motthers was right. Dôlylleuad was sure to be in a bad way. She imagined the starved faces of children deprived of vital sustenance from…She paused to search her memory for the area’s main produce…Er, pears.
“Fine,” she muttered, coming to a halt.
“Pardon?” Motthers asked daringly.
Elodie turned, casting him a brief glare before taking the suitcase back. “Fine. I’ll go.”
Motthers grinned so widely, his mustache appeared in danger of sliding off. “Hurrah!” Then he grimaced. “Um, er, you might want to…”
As he flicked a finger at her lower half, Elodie glanced down and realized that her hem was still knotted. She hurriedly untied it, then began to trudge once more toward the tracks with the air of a French soldier approaching Waterloo. In the far distance, a cloud of steam signaled the train’s approach. With luck, she’d have only a minute to talk with Gabriel before it arrived.
Approaching him was the hardest thing she’d done in a long while, and this was coming from a woman with a doctorate that had required extensive knowledge of trigonometry. She hated the coldhearted, unforgiving man. Absolutely, completely loved—wait, no,loathedhim. Arriving at his side on the platform, she offered a terse yet polite greeting.
But Gabriel went on staring at the block in his hand, such a calm, somber beauty to his face that it made Elodie’s throat ache.Ache like I’ve just swallowed poison,she amended furiously. Setting down her suitcase, she cleared her throat and, when that failed to elicit a response, tried to decide which exact swear word she would shout…
“Do you feel that sound?” Gabriel asked suddenly, not shifting his gaze.
It seemed “Good morning” or even “I say, aren’t you my wife?” were surplus to his conversational requirements. Elodie found herself thrown from aggravation into utter confusion.
“Um?” she said.
Um. A master’s degree, a doctorate, a professorship, and allshe could say was“um”? Her intelligence rolled its eyes in embarrassment.
But Gabriel hadn’t noticed, of course. Pulling herself together, Elodie tried again. “You mean do Iheara sound?”
“No.”
Aggravation stomped back into her brain, shoving confusion aside. “I don’t feel anything,” she said frostily.
And then she did. A tiny sound scraped along her ear canals, whining like a student who has forgotten it’s exam day. “What is that?” she wondered aloud, shaking her head.
