“Professor!” the girl gasped, startled.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” Amelia asked her with a smile.
“Uh, er, no,” Vanity stammered. “Just going down for hot chocolate.”
“You’re headed in the wrong direction, I’m afraid. That’s my bedroom along there. The stairs are back that way.” As she gestured in their direction, she saw an expression on Vanity’sface that was so odd, so fleeting, she could not identify it. Her instincts twitched, however. Glancing along the corridor, she remembered that hers wasn’t the only bedroom in it.
Oh dear.
“Perhaps you should return to your room,” she told the girl kindly. “If you use the bellpull, a servant will attend to you.”
Vanity nodded far more vigorously than the suggestion warranted. “Excellent idea, Professor,” she said, and dashed away.
Amelia sighed as she watched the girl flee. She couldn’t blame her for being attracted to Caleb, but on the other hand was not about to encourage it. Caleb washers. Platonically speaking, of course.
As in Plato’s theory of each person having another half, a soulmate.
As in,just friends.
Friends who would have been making good inroads into being less two halves and more one beast with two backs, were there any justice in the world.
On that sober note, Amelia returned to her bed, wrapped a pillow around her head to block out King John’s rantings, and delved intoThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.It oddly enough proved less entertaining than kissing a handsome, half-naked man, but did have one benefit—it put her to sleep, even if only for a few hours before a pallid sun rose through the murk like a ghost and the week’s history began repeating itself again.
—
By Thursday, she’dgrown frazzled to the extent that her parents, had they seen it, would have disowned her on the spot. She’d also developed a headache from the excessivethaumaturgic energy emitting from so many antiques. (Antiquarians disdained the use of protective equipment, considering it something only “those lunatics in the geography department” needed.) She’d even begun gazing out of windows at the gloomy landscape and sighing forlornly, like a woman in a gothic novel. But matters reached a crisis point over luncheon that Thursday, when she placed jam before clotted cream on her scone.
Upon realizing her error, Amelia reached rather urgently for tea to quell the emotion rising in her throat that just might become a scream. But she stopped, hand suspended in midair, as she noticed Caleb watching her. His eyes were shadowed with concern, and flutters immediately began to dance in her stomach (with scarves, tambourines, and flaming headdresses) as she gazed back at him. Every inch of her skin ached from the deprivation of his casual touch. Never mind erotic possibilities; she missed her chum. Every instinct wanted to smile at him, smooth his hair, and give him a ginger candy that would taste like comfort in his mouth.
Just then, she became aware that the company had fallen into a silence that veritably trembled with fascination. Everyone watched her watch Caleb watching her. It felt as dizzying as it sounded. Luckily, Caleb recognized it too in that moment, and he smirked.
“I didn’t take you for having Devonshire manners, Professor Tarrant,” he said with a languid disdain that seemed to come worryingly easy to him these days.
“Understandable, since you yourself have no manners at all,” Amelia snapped back. Her ire was only partly fake—for the dratted man bore a tiny smear of cream on his upper lip, and he licked it away slowly, purposefully, all the while stillstaring at her. In that moment, Amelia hated him with a passion that threatened to see her moaning at the table, should she fail to repress it.
“You have stripped me of all civility,” Caleb retorted. His eyes flashed, his damp lip glistened in the lamplight, and at the head of the table Sir Nigel grabbed a side plate and began fanning himself with it.
“You certainly are brave, my friend!” Dummersby said to Caleb. “Not many would dare combat such a formidable lady the way you do. We at the museum call her ‘Miss Terrifying Tarrant,’ ha ha.”
Suddenly, the heat in Amelia vanished, leaving her stark white and icy, as though she stood in the pitiless storm that raged outside. Part of her wanted to run out there now, just run and run, fleeing Dummersby’s cruelty, and Throckmorton’s silent glee as he beheld the scene, and even Vanity’s silliness. But she couldn’t run; that would only inspire them to gossip more. The only recourse left was to make some barbed comment and suffer the internal consequences. The pain of injured dignity. The loss of self-respect.
She was not a belligerent woman. She was quiet, studious, always willing to help other people so long as they did not try to interrupt her reading. Through her university student days, she’d been a veritable Jane Grey in a court of passionate Tudors. When agreeing to fake hate Caleb, she’d not appreciated just how much doing so would require her to actually be hateful, and how much that would hurt, as if it broke something essential within herself.
As for her reputation: no one called her a trollop anymore, which was good. They called her “terrifying” instead, whichwas so much worse. She had to wonder: her job and her self…were they really equivalent?
And yet,Caleb. It always came down to that. Just Caleb. If she left Oxford University to escape gossip and maybe find herself again, she’d lose him. He might say beautiful things about crossing any ocean to be with her, but that was how he talked on a regular basis. The fact was, he loved his job too, and he’d overcome immeasurable obstacles to secure it. Indeed, he’d literally risen from the gutter to become a respectable professor (even if he did sometimes, in a shocking display of bad manners, eat his pudding before his main course). Amelia would not allow him to sacrifice that success.
Which meant sacrificing herself. For who would she even be without her Caleb? Just half a woman, with the ghost of that beloved friendship wandering lost, calling out in anguish for its home.
Looking at him now across the table, she saw that he shared none of her troubled emotions. He was relaxed, even amused, about the situation. In his eyes was the stillness Amelia longed for. He gave her that gift, so that for a few perfect seconds the world became nothing but the two of them, together without words. His gaze was an embrace, gentle and unflinching, better than any kiss (although Amelia would happily take a kiss also—or perhaps several—just to be sure her comparison was accurate). Her stress eased, and even the storm outside seemed to sigh with a wild kind of peace.
Then slowly Caleb blinked, and turning his head, he looked at Dummersby.
“ProfessorTerrifying Tarrant,” he corrected the man. Three simple words, a whole threatening monologue within them.
Forget fluttering. Amelia’s nether regions outright swooned, and not even the sternest good sense in her brain could revive it.
Dummersby laughed, but it was a tremulous sound, almost frightened. “Of course. I beg your pardon, Professor Tarrant.” He spoke with a skill that so many gentlemen in middle management enjoy: being able to insult someone in the most obvious and yet wholly irreproachable manner possible. Nastiness veritably oozed from the smile he slithered in Amelia’s direction. All at once, her stress rushed back. Then, once certain she’d apprehended his intent, Dummersby directed that smile at Vanity. “I’m a great supporter of lady academics, aren’t I, Miss Tunnicliffe?”
