Thwack.Amelia set down her clipboard on a small table with such force, not only did the table shake but also Sir Nigel and, over one hundred miles away in Oxford, several third-year students. “Perhaps the locket is merely in a different place than Professor Sterling remembers,” she said, and brought forth a thaumometer from her cardigan pocket. The efficiency of her manner both frightened and calmed everyone in the room: she was that most daunting of creatures, a Woman Who Knew What She Was Doing; but on the other hand, who better to solve the problem? With her at the helm, they need not fear England’s destruction at the hands of some lunatic wielding a magical necklace—or worse, a delay in getting their luncheon until said necklace was found.
“Hmm,” Amelia murmured, frowning at the thaumometer. It’s intensity indicator was at seven, and the secondary needle, a direction guide, pointed to where Caleb and Vanity stood at the sideboard.
“Itisthere,” she said. “Or, at least, something is.” Watching her gauge, she began to cross the room, weaving around furniture. With each step, the intensity needle flicked higher.
“Oh dear!” Vanity exclaimed, backing up until she was against the sideboard. Something fell to the floor, but she ignored it, her expression tightening with anxiety. “Is there going to be another explosion?”
“No,” Caleb reassured her.
“Maybe,” Amelia said at the same time. “Go and stand on the other side of the—”
Completing this sentence proved unnecessary, for Vanity had dashed across the room to huddle behind Professor Throckmorton even before Amelia was halfway through it. Stepping up to where the girl had been, Amelia set a hand on Caleb’s arm to shift him aside. The density of his muscle beneath her fingers sent such a rush of emotion through her that she felt briefly woozy. The man stood right beside her—they were in actual physical contact—and still she missed him quite desperately. She wished she could have just one quiet, private hour with him, chatting about inconsequential things, knocking their feet together in mock battle the way they sometimes did when they forgot they were grown-ups. But this was entirely the wrong moment to indulge in sentimental imaginings. Two of her worst nemeses watched from across the room: Throckmorton, whose gossip had almost ruined her career, let alone her relationship with Caleb, and Dummersby, whose sleazy comments over the years, and whose spite whenever she’d enforced boundaries with him, had at times come close to draining her courage for academia altogether. Together, the men embodied everything a woman of intellect and ambition faced in the world these days, and she would not willingly provide more fuel for their chauvinism. Besides, any moment now Vanity was going to either giggle or say something flirtatious to Caleb, and Amelia feared her headache would flare into aninferno of pain should that happen. So she focused with staid professionalism on the sideboard…
Thwomp.
The air seemed to jolt. Lamplight blotted out as if the entire world had blinked, and two seconds later she found herself standing in a small, dirty room, blinking through shadows, inhaling the smell of ashes and old fish.
Amelia raised her brow with a professional degree of surprise (and wrinkled her nose in disgust). Evidently, she was not in Cumbria anymore; the stench alone confirmed that, assisted by noises of traffic and machinery that permeated the thin, stained walls of the hovel. “Hm,” she said, and turned to survey her predicament.
Sickly light filtering through broken window shutters illuminated a small, weeping boy huddled on a mattress so filthy, Amelia’s skin crawled to see it. A tangle of blond hair obscured the child’s face as he hugged himself, but Amelia didn’t need to see it to know exactly who he was. The recognition came from her very soul.
“Caleb,” she whispered, her pulse staggering. So she was gone not only from Cumbria but from 1890 as well.Fascinating. Also possibly irreversible—but Amelia had dealt with magic for so long now, a little thing like being shunted twenty-some years back in time did not immediately alarm her. She checked the thaumometer still in her hand. Its needles were flat.
The boy did not see her, of course. She was less than a ghost; she was a memory of the world to come, a dream of time, beyond his perception. Nevertheless, instinct propelled her forward, drawn as always to be close to him, to touch his head or his tearstained cheek if she could, and so complete her own existence.
“You’re dead,”he whimpered.
Shock went through Amelia like a thaumaturgic blast, stopping her abruptly in her tracks. But then she realized the child wasn’t speaking to her. Across the room, in a pathetically narrow bed, a man lay white-faced, shrunken to the bone by cholera. Caleb’s father. Amelia remembered Caleb describing this afternoon to her in terms that had not fully encompassed the stench of the room or the despair he’d felt. An hour later, his mother had come home from her factory job and taken him in her arms, comforting him despite her own grief. A year later, he’d been sponsored to attend boarding school, setting him on the path to becoming a teacher himself. And thirteen years after that, having worked in every spare moment, including summer holidays, he’d finally rescued his mother from the slum, buying her a tiny cottage in beautiful, peaceful Dorset, where she lived yet. He was happy. Amelia knew all this, but even so felt as if her heart might break for the little boy crouching alone with death. She closed her eyes, wishing…
“Amelia Tarrant!”
She looked up at the sound of her name being called in a warm, triumphant tone. The scene had changed; time had skittered in a new direction. Before her lay a stage, populated by half a dozen students standing in a tidy row and a teacher at a lectern; it was the latter who had spoken. An audience began to clap politely as a girl stepped from the line—her seventeen-year-old self, Amelia realized. This was the graduation ceremony at boarding school, and she was about to be awarded her second prize of the day, this one for Most Helpful Student. And Caleb…
She turned to see an adolescent Caleb standing nearby in the wings, his face a little flushed, his breath panting, suggestingthat he’d run to get there. His hair was deplorably tumbled, although somehow it looked perfect on him, as if he’d been interrupted painting a Romantic masterpiece or composing the next great novel. His jacket, shabby and thin, anticipated the shoulder breadth he’d develop in years to come. As for his tie—Amelia winced a little to see its state of disarray.
He’d overslept, she remembered, despite the ceremony taking place in the mid-afternoon. In five minutes’ time he’d be named Most Inventive Student, and the audience of their peers would go wild in celebration as he sauntered onto the stage like a fairy prince playing at being human for a while.
Amelia smiled, the recollection providing somewhat of a balm after the misery she’d just witnessed. But then, while she gazed at Caleb, the smile slowly faded into confusion. For his expression was almost sorrowful as he watched her past self accept the award, and Amelia could not understand—did he wish to be Most Helpful Student himself? In that case he ought not have installed the school’s milk cow in the headmistress’s office overnight.
He pressed a hand against his heart, sighing in a way that indicated more than just breathlessness from having run. It was the sigh of a young man who’d read a lovely, soulful poem and grieved that he could not step into its universe. The sigh of a boy first learning that the age of chivalric knights was long gone. Or, incredibly, the sigh Amelia herself had given too many times through her adolescence—secretly loving this gorgeous, kind friend of hers, desperately wishing they could share more than friendship, and knowing they never would.
As onstage Amelia shook the teacher’s hand, Caleb’s expression melted into a smile more tender than any Amelia had ever seen. Then the scene swayed dizzyingly. Caleb became agolden shadow; the audience’s applause faded into a vague tumult. Amelia blinked, and suddenly she was four years ahead, dancing with Caleb at a university ball. Spangles of lantern light swirled around them, the rest of the world a blur as they waltzed in its heart. Watching, she echoed the sigh she’d just heard from Caleb, remembering this evening and how she had felt comprised of nothing but light and music, held so assuredly in Caleb’s hands while he not only danced to perfection but also treated her with exquisite, formal manners…
She blinked again, and found herself in shadow.
Every emotion sank to the pit of her stomach. Nearby, crouching on the damp grass behind a boarding school dormitory, a young girl was weeping with such loneliness and hurt that it took Amelia’s breath away. Even all these years later, with a degree and a professorship and a pleasant life, she remembered in exact detail the crush of that loneliness, and still felt the hurt some days, as if it had left a scar deep in her soul.
“Are you a lost fairy?”
At the sweet question, she turned, and on the ground her younger self looked up. They both stared at the fair-haired boy gently approaching. He had about him a warmth that seemed to be sourced from pure sunshine, and he smiled as if with sheer happiness at being alive.
“No, I don’t think you are,”he said musingly as he considered her.“Fairies don’t have drippy noses.”
Amelia laughed. And the little girl she’d been, tears glinting in her dark eyes like dreams while she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, laughed too. Hearing it, Amelia’s emotions rose again in a great, beautiful swell to fill her throat with all the years of delight, good cheer, and love she’d experienced since this moment.
Suddenly, someone clasped her hand, drawing her back into the light.
“Got you,” Caleb said.
