Sigh,breathed the ghosts. Amelia knew how they felt.
“Careful, Sterling!” Throckmorton yelled when Caleb lifteda beer stein from a box of assorted drinkware that had been stored in one corner of the sitting room. “Belgian!”
“What’s wrong with Belgian?” Vanity asked curiously.
“If you lift the lid of that stein, it plays folk songs,” Sir Nigel warned, before Throckmorton could answer. His voice had strengthened through the week as he reveled in having an audience with whom he could share all about his collection (in other words,every single possible detail of every single antique,until even Amelia wanted to bash him around the head with a fifteenth-century shoe horn)—but his fingers twined together anxiously as he watched Caleb inspect the silver-lidded ceramic mug, because sharing inevitably led tosharing, and he really wanted to keep the antiques entirely for himself.
“I got that stein from a tinker,” he said. “Fine fellow, had an extraordinary yellow hat, I asked him who his milliner was and he said—”
“Brussels!” Throckmorton boomed. “Full of magic since the revolution!”
“—A special saffron dye that they make in the—” Sir Nigel pressed on.
“Town hall turned to chocolate!” Throckmorton bellowed.
“Eep!” Vanity clasped her hands against her breast. “Will the mug explode with psycho-conjunctive magic, like the butter dish and the teaspoon from Hereford?”
Amelia’s heart skipped a beat. “How do you know about the teaspoon?”
“Oh.” Vanity looked flustered, her eyelashes fluttering. “Professor Sterling told meallabout it.”
Something about her emphasis made Amelia’s heart not only skip another beat but kick one down into her stomach.
Caleb, however, just laughed. “I did?” Seeing Amelia frown at him, he shrugged. “I don’t remember. But no, I don’t think this stein is as powerful as the—” He paused fleetingly at Amelia’s repressive expression. “The butter dish. If it even has thaumaturgic properties at all.” As he tossed it to Amelia for a second opinion, Vanity flinched. Caleb gave her a warm, reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. I’d never let anything hurt you.”
Vanity fluttered her eyelashes again and sighed dreamily. Meanwhile, Amelia gritted her teeth against a burning pain in her hands as the stein began to prickle with magical energy. Suddenly its silver lid ripped off, speeding across the room to embed itself in the wall opposite. “POUR LA BIÈRE ET LE ROI!” sang out heartily from the mug’s interior.
“Seems I was wrong,” Caleb said with an apologetic grimace. “Oh dear, are you all right?” The fact that he was asking Vanity, who had jolted with fright, and not Amelia, whose stinging palms had begun turning blue with magic, was of no concern to the latter. She merely blamed the…er…the lack of good coffee in Ravenscroft Manorfor feeling at that moment like she’d quite enjoy stabbing something taller and blonder than a notebook.
“Excuse me, please,” she said placidly, setting down the beer stein and marching off to count plates in the parlor until she might be allowed to safely use a pencil again.
—
Dinners were calmerthan the first they had experienced in the manor—which was a polite way of saying they were hideously boring, but at least nothing exploded. Taken in the parlor and shunned by Lady Ruperta (to whom eating dinner in a breakfast zone was akin to King Edward IV marrying acommoner), they might have proven tolerable had not Sir Nigel employed the opportunity to ramble on incessantly about antiques with his “fellow experts.” Even Amelia, whose patience was matched only by her interest in collectibles, soon found her mind growing so numb, she couldn’t remember which knife she should use for her meat dish, and nearly sprained her wrist trying to cut a steak with a blade made for lettuce.
“You must have traveled extensively, to find so many treasures,” Caleb said during a brief pause in a monologue about Peter the Great’s pocket watch. “Russian jewelry, French dinnerware, German shields, jugs from Greece.” Reaching for the salt to season his meal, he chuckled self-deprecatingly. “I for one get queasy just going from Oxford to London.”
“How lucky you and Lady Ruperta are to have visited Russia,” Amelia said as she replaced the sugar canister Caleb was about to pick up with the saltcellar he actually wanted. “It’s a country I’d love to see.”
“Oh, we never travel,” Sir Nigel answered with surprise, as if the very idea were preposterous. “Most of my treasures are acquired by agents. Ruperta would like to visit France—she says she wants to drive through Paris in a phaeton, even though I remind her that the wind would ruin her coiffure—but who wouldn’t prefer a new piece of Wedgwood Jasperware than a French holiday?” He indicated the plate collection on the wall, among which were seven Jasperware dishes, and Amelia suddenly understood his wife’s unpleasant attitude. It was all very fine to love antiques, but one must make room for other interests also, or else risk developing a closed mind. For example, when not working, she herself enjoyed reading (about history), going on strolls (through historical sites), and taking in public lectures (on guess which subject). But she doubted Sir Nigelstrolled any greater distance than that between one room and another in the huge cabinet of curiosities that he called his home.
“Now, take this fork, for example,” the man said, holding up what appeared to be either a fish fork or seafood fork (the vital difference between these being even more beyond Amelia’s tired intelligence than the identification of knives had been). “Fascinating piece, with remarkable—”
Whoosh!The contents of the sauceboat in front of Amelia erupted like a volcano of flaming cream, complete with parsley debris. She threw her linen napkin over the dish, which stopped it spattering but also transformed the napkin into a tiny swan. This flapped overhead in a silent panic for several moments before reverting to its original shape, floating down to land on Grimshaw’s head, where it remained, for a butler never undertakes personal grooming during the dinner service.
So much for nothing exploding. “How has anyone survived living in this house?” Vanity remarked grumpily, then caught herself and giggled as if she’d meant it in the cheeriest way.
“It’s not usually this hectic,” Sir Nigel said, wringing his hands. “True, Ruperta has been turned into a frog once or twice, and there was that time an iron poker belonging to Mac Bethad mac Findláich, the Red King of Scotland—”
“The Scottish Play is a good example of the dangers with interpreting history,” Dummersby interrupted. “Shakespeare created a travesty, blackening Macbeth’s reputation. He was an honorable king!”
“Mmmpph mm,” Throckmorton said through a mouthful, sounding uncannily like he’d saidit’s Scottish history, who cares?
Amelia tried to figure out how they’d got from flamingsauce to Shakespeare, and rather envied Lady Ruperta’s having been turned into a frog, which sounded altogether peaceful. Across the table, Caleb was drinking wine with his eyes closed. She suspected he was asleep, dreaming of Oxford, that cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, towery city…
Oh my God,she thought with horror.I’m quoting poetry. If anyone needed sleep it was she, most urgently, to restore her good sense.
But night offered no peace. King John’s cantankerous ghost rampaged, keeping her awake despite the exhaustion weighing her down. She could not read the biography of Mary Wollstonecraft because she’d left it in Caleb’s bedroom, and she dared not visit him to fetch it—or do things more exciting even than reading a good book—for while Professor Throckmorton might be a snoop, Dummersby was a sneak, which represented a greater degree of villainy. On Wednesday night, she finally crept down to the dining room, ignoring mysterious creaks and whispered voices behind the walls along the way (if ghosts wanted her attention, they’d have to seek it during working hours) and she tookThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empireto read instead. On the way back to her bedroom, she met Vanity tiptoeing along the upstairs corridor by the light of a single candle.
