“Eep!” Vanity squealed again pointedly as Amelia abandoned the ladder to set her hands on her hips instead.
“It doesn’t matter what facts! Stories are no substitute for documented evidence.”
“Oh ho, here we go.” Throckmorton chuckled, nudging Dummersby.
Caleb shrugged. “Eh. An interesting poem or legend does enliven—”
“Legend?!”
CRASH!
This, fortunately, was not the sound of Vanity falling from the ladder, but of a small dish nearby that spontaneously exploded. Ceramic fragments and sparks of hot blue magic shot through the gallery.
“Oh no!” Sir Nigel cried out. “My seventeenth-century creamware butter dish from Staffordshire!” He ran about gathering the pieces, yelping as they burned him with magic, and in the process almost knocking Vanity once and for all off the ladder.
“Hold on, Miss Tunnicliffe!” Caleb said, and hastened across to grasp the ladder and steady it. Amelia, thus belatedly noticing Vanity’s predicament, grabbed hold of the other side also. The two of them looked at each other across the rungs. Caleb winked; Amelia frowned. “Are you all right?” Caleb asked.
“F-fine thank you,” Vanity answered as she carefully descended the ladder. Upon reaching the ground’s safety, she looked around repeatedly and without any interest in her polite demurrals.
Amelia dragged her attention away from Caleb to the girl. “It must have had psycho-conjunctive properties,” she said.
“Psycho-conjunctive,” Vanity repeated, sounding out the syllables carefully, as if they might explode too.
“It’s a powerful thaumaturgic energy.”
Vanity perked up, her near death apparently forgotten. “Ooh! Psycho conjunctivitis, you say?” She giggled, thus making it impossible to know if she was joking or irredeemably stupid. “Is there anything else here like it?”
“Be careful asking Miss Tarrant such questions,” Dummersby advised with an unpleasant little laugh. “She’ll break your brain with her answer.”
Amelia smiled at Vanity with such calm steadiness, she could have been mistaken for a kindergarten teacher. Before she could summon a dignified remark, however, Caleb spoke.
“Dummersby, old chap, would you mind getting my magnifying glass from the drawing room?”
“Hmph, hmph,” Dummersby replied, which was Fuddy-Duddy Academic dialect forI suppose, if I must.
“Cheers. And while you’re there, would you check if there’s a vase that’s contempis—contempter—”
“Contemporaneous,” Dummersby corrected him automatically.
Slap!
—
The presence ofacademia’s foremost tattletales denied Amelia any opportunity to share a pleasant conversation with Caleb, let alone kiss him senseless (in the name of social science, that is). Instead, she was forced to maintain their pretense of hostility, spurred on by Throckmorton’s jibes. This quickly lost its spark, not to mention its store of interesting insults. At the start of the week, she was denouncing Caleb as a “diabolically impertinent miscreant who would make the traitor Simon de Montfort seem like a good friend in comparison.” By the end, he was a “brat.”
“Okay,” he would answer with a careless shrug in any case—which quite honestly almost made Amelia want to fight him for real.
“It is not okay,” she replied more than once, driven by tetchiness to use slang. Each time, Vanity would glance sidelong at her and then the surrounding stacks of antiques, expecting another explosion. And Amelia, hating how tense herevery muscle had become, tried not to cry with emotional exhaustion. A Tarrant never cried. She herself had not done so since she was eight, and it would be infuriating should two mean-spirited men drive her to it now. Accordingly, she clenched her muscles tighter and set a tranquil smile upon her face, and if there existed a number of puncture holes in her notebook where her pencil tip had stabbed through the pages, that was not, despite appearances, to the point.
Work offered little respite, since she and Caleb were forced into a proximity that might have been thrilling if only not so dusty, so crammed with antiques, and morever occupied by Dummersby, Throckmorton, Vanity, Sir Nigel, Sergeant Sheffield, and several wan ghosts. It was a torment to be in the same room as Caleb, often no farther apart than a few inches, having his permission to stroke him, kiss him, explore his body…Amelia paused the thought to fan herself…and yet having no opportunity for it. They were watched constantly. Every move they made was accompanied by a chorus.
“Too slow!” Throckmorton scoffed when a soup ladle flew from Amelia’s hands on sudden, unexpected wings of magic.
“You are so strong, Professor,” Vanity sighed as Caleb moved a chair to evaluate the tapestry behind it.
“Iwould don gloves before I opened an antique book,” Dummersby commented tartly, watching Amelia inspect a tattered old copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets that she estimated to be worth a penny at most.
“You are so brave, Professor,” Vanity exclaimed as Caleb peered into a Ming vase.
