THUD.
Now the entire gathering jolted as Sterling slammed his book shut. He stared back at Amelia.
Beaulieu had considered himself an expert on the Black Death until this moment, seeing the expression in Sterling’s eyes. Amelia, for her part, did not even blink.
“Oh dear,” Dummersby murmured. “Here we go again…”
—
Amelia watched coollyas Caleb approached. He took his time, pausing now and again to chat with people in the crowd, but he flashed her dark glances just to prove himself an absolute villain. She frowned in reply.
She’d not seen him since the Ashmolean incident. After the flames had been extinguished and the museum’s curators settled with tea and biscuits, she’d been summoned by Professor Ottersock, head of Oxford’s Material History faculty, and she’d made her attitude clear to him.
“I hate the man,” she declared (albeit in the polite, gently modulated tones of a well-brought-up lady for whom hatred was something expressed only in strictest privacy). “I certainly did not intend to meet him in the museum at night. We argued, which is how the candlestick got dropped. It won’t happen again, I can assure you.”
In response, Ottersock justlookedat her over the glass of laudanum he was about to drink for his sudden migraine.
“Sterling is a scoundrel,” Amelia added for good measure. And then, worried that she’d gone too far—“He’s also an excellent historian and valued colleague, of course.”
“Sit down, Tarrant,” Ottersock said wearily, gesturing at achair in front of his desk. “Talk to me about what’s going on for you.”
Good God. Amelia had not become an expert antiquarian and professor at the age of twenty-six byhaving conversations. “I’m fine,” she said, which was as emphatic an end to the matter as any British person could provide.
Ottersock sighed and scratched at his bushy gray sideburns. “Let me put it another way. I want to know what on earth you were thinking, young lady! Mishandling a thaumaturgic candlestick and causing a fire is one thing, but a girl should not be working alone in a museum after dark, let alone bantering with a male colleague!”
“Arguing,” Amelia corrected him.
“Engaging in private intercourse,”he corrected her right back, with all the authority of a faculty head and older white male.
Amelia was so alarmed by this definition she nearly gasped aloud. She’d barely escaped losing her position at Oxford earlier this year due to Caleb Sterling. Although they had been friends since they met as eight-year-olds in boarding school, the moment Professor Throckmorton from Medieval Studies caught them hugging, that became impossible.
Throckmorton, caring not that Caleb had merely been consoling her after she received news of her grandfather’s death, had spread such malicious gossip that Amelia was officially told to either marry Caleb or quit her professorship. After all, just because women had been admitted to tertiary education after Queen Charlotte demanded it a hundred years earlier didn’t mean they were free toact like men. Heavens, if female academics started touching their male colleagues willy-nilly (so to speak), what would come next? Trousers on ladies?!
She’d survived the scandal, unmarried and employed, because no one would call Caleb and her friends these days. Indeed, they were the very model of foes. And yet still she felt her job in peril.
“I’m afraid I have no time to discuss the matter,” she told Ottersock. “I’m going to Hereford to follow up on a clue about treasure in the cathedral there.” Actually, she’d planned her departure for tomorrow, but getting out of town fast seemed the only way to avoid this talk. “My train leaves in two hours.”
Ottersock choked on his laudanum. “What? You can’t just run off! We haven’t finished our discussion! Sit down!”
Driven to desperate measures, Amelia looked at her wristwatch, then raised big, imploring eyes to the faculty head. Alarm that she might start crying blazed across Ottersock’s face.
“Fine,” he grumped. “Go! And for God’s sake, don’t blow anything up!”
She’d gone, only returning this afternoon in time for the symposium—and withabsolutely no awareness whatsoeverthat Caleb also was staying at the Minervaeum. Indeed, when Professor Jemeson from Cambridge University’s Classics faculty waylaid her in a corridor to inform her of this (“Now, don’t go burning down the club, little lady, ha ha…Say, want to come to dinner with me?”), Amelia had expressed complete surprise.
Unfortunately, Jemeson had not told her about the pre-symposium drinks being held in the library, and now here Caleb was, walking toward her through a crowd of people trained to tell stories. Amelia looked up to the ceiling’s painted heaven, but its frolicking cherubs offered no inspiration. When she looked down again, Caleb was standing on the other side of the table, as if he’d magically folded space and time to reach her.
“Good evening, Mr. Sterling,” she said in a prim voice.
“Miss Tarrant,” he drawled. “Sitting alone in a corner, I see.”
“Hoping to avoid unpleasant company,” she replied pointedly.
He smirked. She stared. The atmosphere grew almost unbearably tense (perhaps because everyone in the library was holding their breath).
Then Caleb gave a dramatic sigh. Dropping into the chair opposite Amelia, he leaned forward, elbows on the table and chin set atop his linked fingers. His blue-eyed gaze seemed to twinkle behind wayward strands of hair. “Hello, Meely.”
Amelia glanced at the historians behind him, who hastily looked away as if they possessed no interest whatsoever in the conversation. “Please leave, Mr. Sterling,” she replied. “I’m trying to work.”
