“Half a mile at the most.”
“Aahhh! A mosquito just bit my hand!”
“Oh dear.”
“If I come down with malaria…or worse, if I get an unsightly bite on my face…the tragedy will be— Ugh, what did I just step in?”
“Sheep shit, probably,” Amelia replied complacently, which silenced Caleb for several minutes due to sheer astonishment. And perhaps just a touch of arousal. All right, quite a lot of arousal. Indeed, he’d have pulled her down to the ground andkissed more uncouth language from her mouth if only said ground was dry, clean, and a feather bed.
“It must be around here somewhere,” Amelia muttered, pausing in front of a purple flowering shrub. “Hydrangeas are summer blooms, so magic clearly is afoot.” She glared at the shrub as if she could frighten its secrets out of it.
Caleb took the opportunity to consider her carefully. She was pale, despite all the exercise, and the way she crossed her arms suggested it wasn’t just her usual professorial stance, but an attempt to warm herself. He’d have given her his coat but he’d not brought it. The two of them had gone out in shirtsleeves like a pair of idiotic city dwellers who would almost certainly develop pneumonia as a result.
He turned his attention to the sky, serious now. It was purpled with age, bruised by dark clouds that threatened more wild weather to come. The wind smelled of mountains and dusky loneliness as it rushed down from the Scottish Highlands like an invading medieval army. It had nigh on defeated Amelia’s prim coiffure, and Caleb hated to think about the state of his own.
“ ‘Dreary winds foreboding call the darkness down again,’ ” he warned.
Amelia gave him a bewildered look. “What?”
“It’s going to rain,” he clarified in blunt prose. “And we’ll—”
“Develop pneumonia,” she inserted a little wearily.
“No,” he said, offended that she would assume he was thinking such a thing (even though he had been). “I wasgoingto say that we’ll have to race back to the house.”
“I’m sure you’ll survive,” Amelia told him, although her attention was veering again to the shrub. “I’ve watched you run across Mayfair to get the Duke of Bedford’s clock before Professor Murkle did.”
“That was sprinting. I’m not made for going the distance.”
“How honest of a man to admit such a thing,” she remarked dryly.
Caleb’s jaw dropped. He demanded a smart comeback from his brain, but all the fresh air had emptied it of wit. Amelia smiled a little triumphantly, then squatted down to brush at the ground beneath the hydrangea shrub.
“It looks like someone’s been digging here,” she said.
“Be careful.”
“Thaumaturgic minerals aren’t usually close to the surface,” she assured him. “I’m not going to make anything explode.”
“I meant, be careful of breaking a fingernail,” he said. Squatting beside her, he peered at the ground. “It was probably just some animal.”
“No, listen.” She paused, her head tilted to the side. “Can you hear it? Ticking.”
Caleb did indeed hear a faint mechanical clicking from within the ground, and his pulse shouted in answer. When Amelia started to dig, he caught her hand, pulling it away from the dirt to set it on her thigh.
“Cale—” she began chidingly.
“Sh,” he said, and continued the work himself. Amelia went quiet, watching him, and Caleb felt all tingly at the realization that he’d actually charmed her with his mediocre heroism. Immediately increasing his efforts so as to appear even more impressive, he soon felt something cold and smooth beneath his fingers.
“What the…?” he murmured, and with some tugging, some ruination of an expensive manicure, he pulled a small circular object from the ground. It fit in his palm, ticking with all the contentment of a cat come in from the weather.
“It’s a pocket watch,” Amelia said, taking it from him.
“I can see that,” he said, taking it back. They stood, and Caleb turned the watch over in his hand, brushing dirt from the gold case to reveal an etching of a double-headed eagle inlaid with what appeared to be rubies.
“Didn’t Sir Nigel say something about owning Peter the Great’s pocket watch?” Amelia asked, running a fingertip over the design. Caleb tingled as if it were his bare skin that she’d stroked.
“God knows. I stopped listening to the man several days ago.” He turned the watch over again, noting further details. “I would guess a Russian provenance myself, but Dummersby could probably say better on the subject. I can confirm, though, that it’s magical.”
