Amelia looked around dazedly, one last time. Recognizing Ravenscroft Manor’s cluttered drawing room, she felt the steady weight of the rain-hushed torpor that had been smothering her all week, and that soothed her racing pulse now. A moment later she was being turned roughly, fingers digging into her arms, blue eyes staring at her with a fear that had defied time to find her and bring her home. Not Oxford home but at his side, where she belonged.Caleb.Amelia’s heart cried with sorrow and relief. She wanted to take him in her arms, comforting the little boy who had been so cruelly hurt. She wanted to kiss the man who had spent the past two decades making her laugh as if it were his best beloved dream coming true again and again. But their fellow academics were looking on, big-eyed with worry, confusion, and excitement.
“Oh, Professor Tarrant, it was so frightening!” Vanity exclaimed. “You were flashing in and out of visibility! And then Professor Sterling rescued you, like a knight of yore.”
“Knight? Hardly!” Throckmorton scoffed.
“He just pulled her out of the spell,” Dummersby agreed, grumbling. “He didn’t slay a dragon for her.”
“It was so heroic,” Vanity sighed, nevertheless.
Amelia wanted to sigh herself, although in an entirely different tone from Vanity’s, for it was obvious the story of this event was going to be shared all through the antiquarian community. Taking a slow, steadying breath, she returned Caleb’s gaze with a temperate one of her own. He on the other hand appeared rather desperate, as if he anticipated her disappearing again at any moment.
I’m safe,she assured him wordlessly.I’m here with you.
But aloud she said in a cool, slightly disapproving voice, “You can unhand me now, Professor Sterling. There is no need for such dramatics.”
“I am not the one who slipped out of time, Professor Tarrant,” he replied, giving her one of his rare, fierce, genuine frowns, the kind he usually reserved for cheating students, conservative politicians, and cold coffee.Don’t leave me again.
How could a moon ever leave her soul’s gravity?she’d have told him, had she been able to speak truly. But even a fleeting smile was impossible, considering their audience.
“Slipped out of time?” Vanity echoed with a disorienting mix of histrionics and glee. “Egad, Mr. Hunt was right! Time’s fabric is ripping apart!”
“Not at all,” Amelia said, practically yanking herself out of Caleb’s grip so as to turn and smile at the girl. “It was only a small pocket of retrospective experience. Time didn’t come apart; it drew me in.”
“Drew in how?” Throckmorton demanded, the words thick with pipe smoke.
Amelia was not about to share what she’d seen. She wasn’t even sure at this point whether she would tell Caleb. Although the visit into his past had been accidental, it still felt like an intrusion, and she feared making him even half as embarrassed by it as she was herself—embarrassed and confused and really quite dizzied by the vision of his eyes filled with such…love…as he’d watched her. And not the genial love of friendship, either, but one that wanted to express itself directly, with hands and lips and other body parts Amelia dared not even think about lest she spontaneously combust, which would be highly unprofessional of her, to say nothing of un-Tarrant-like.
“What caused it?” she mused aloud, looking around at the dozens of antiques cluttering the room. Temporal disruption was a vanishingly rare magic (literally vanishingly, as she’d just experienced), and certainly not one they wanted to introduce to the British Museum’s thaumaturgic milieu, unless Dummersby and his associates liked the idea of holdinginteractivepresentations of ancient warriors and dinosaur fossils. No, an object with that kind of power needed to go into the Ashmolean’s double-locked vault.
If they ever found it, that is, among Sir Nigel’s junk.
Just then she noticed that she was standing on a black sock. Shifting her foot off it, she crouched, holding out the thaumometer. Its needle remained flat: no active magic. Picking up the sock, she felt the shape of something small and thin hidden inside, and understood what she had.
The Hereford teaspoon!her brain exclaimed, headache forgotten in its sudden excitement. Although the little antique spoon was emitting no energy now, moments ago its psycho-conjunctive power had actually materialized her wish for more time with Caleb! Such potency was phenomenal. Forget the paper she was planning to write on the teaspoon—this was going to be a whole book! If, that is, Caleb didn’t lose it before she could begin work. Struggling to keep her expression unaffected, she stood.
“What’s that?” Vanity asked, her voice high-pitched, her face blanching as if she anticipated imminent disaster.
“It’s an Italian-milled cashmere sock,” Caleb said, frowning at it with a tinge of confusion, while simultaneously Amelia answered, “Nothing important.” But the look she gave him told a whole other story. Or, rather, a tract of nonfiction, i.e., theThaumaturgic Antiquaries Safety Regulations Manual,whichthey were supposed to read once a year to keep its contents fresh in their minds. (Amelia did so every six months. Caleb hadn’t picked it up in a decade.) Granted, this manual did not specifically state that dangerous antique teaspoons ought not be stored in hosiery, but surely that went without saying.
“How did it get down here?” Caleb murmured, his confusion deepening from a tinge to a tint that darkened his eyes. “I had it in my suitcase.”
“So youdiddouble-check it was there?” Amelia asked, recalling their last conversation on the subject.
He paused for the slightest moment, then: “Yes,” he said with a tone of outrage that she’d even doubt it. Which meant, obviously,no.
Amelia inhaled a breath and held it, along with several sharp words. But the image of the five-year-old he’d been, so small, so impoverished, made her want to cry instead of shout, and hug him, and forgive his appallingly slack work habits. (At least for now. No doubt she’d change her mind next time she had to loan him yet another pen.)
Besides, there was the minor point of her having more than once put that same teaspoon carelessly in her own pocket, even knowing how unstable it could be. But— “Why just a sock?” she asked.
“Look.” Caleb pulled back its cuff to reveal another cloth container within.
“Hm,” Amelia said, a tiny bit less stern, recognizing that he’d stored the teaspoon inside a safe bag, then covered that with the sock.
“And it’s not ‘just’ a sock,” he added. “AnItalian-milledsock. Using diluted sulfuric acid from a cave in the Apennines.”
In other words, one of the most thaumaturgically activezones in Central Europe. “Hm,” Amelia reiterated, but with a tone of approval this time. He’d been quite clever. One might even say “admirably diligent,” were one not in earshot of people who believed she hated him.
“I haven’t touched it since I stored it away,” Caleb told her, and his tone was serious enough for Amelia to believe him. That meant the teaspoon had somehow made its own way downstairs.
