“You must not wander around outside!” she remonstrated.
Caleb and Amelia waited for her to explain that doing so was dangerous, or that it distracted her staff, or that she feared they would expire from a chill. But the only thing furthered was her angry frown.
“We apologize,” Caleb said with a polite bow of his head.
“Hm,” Lady Ruperta replied, which managed to convey in its brusque syllable how much she disliked them and how dearly she wanted them gone, but alas how she was forced to tolerate their presence until they’d rid her house of its junk. For a moment all three stood in grim silence, contemplating the certainty of them being in each other’s company for quite some time yet, considering how many trinkets and artworks still awaited assessment in the entrance hall around them. Then Caleb brought out the pocket watch.
“We found this,” he said, handing it to Lady Ruperta. She backed away, looking aghast.
“What was that doing outside?” Her voice was so rigid, it sounded like it might crack at any moment. “Sir Nigel is going to be furious.” Whipping around, she glared at the nearest footman. “Are you responsible for this?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied at once. And then his eyes seemed to lose focus, as if he were catching up with his words. “I—I—took it—uh—”
“Dreadful behavior!” Lady Ruperta interrupted him, the very picture of aristocratic outrage (which is the same as everyone else’s outrage, except that the clutched pearls are real). “Go at once and make me some tea! As foryou—” She turned her glare to Caleb and Amelia. “Stay indoors, if you please. Onewould hope you’ll concentrate on your work so it mighteventuallybe concluded.”
She swept away, and Caleb and Amelia exchanged the same grimace—abashed yet relieved—that they’d expressed after various close calls with authority figures in the past, from Ottersock to the groundskeeper who’d found them behind the dormitory, the first day they met, and had suspected them of that ultimate crime: playing with marbles during school hours. Without further discussion beyond a brush of hands that was more eloquent than a Shakespeare sonnet, they hurried to wash and change for dinner.
At the table, Sir Nigel was delighted to be reunited with his pocket watch, and rambled on from the fish entree to the custard pudding about its various features. Caleb tuned him out. He had more important things to do than listen; namely, glancing repeatedly at Amelia through the thicket of serving dishes and hothouse flowers, no matter how unwise that might be. She, for her part, was more restrained. Nothing existed in her countenance but calm, good manners. Caleb began to question his memory as to whether she really had blushed like wild roses, just one hour earlier, while his fingers glided through her most private place. It was as though magic had never happened, only the purposeless tick of an old watch.
And so things went on, same as before. And perhaps Sir Nigel’s antiques had broken time as Vanity feared they might, so that each day echoed the others, trapping Caleb and Amelia interminably in their secrets, until Caleb began to believe he would never see the sunlight of London again, its loveliness a dreamy faint blur of gold behind the city’s smog.
Chapter Seventeen
Most important historic decisions were made in the one
place we can never access: the depths of a person’s heart.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
Thursday afternoon decayedwith a sullen, creeping slowness into grim shadow. A storm that had raged all day finally dissipated, leaving only a mild breeze like a ghost. The quiet felt sinister. A few lingering raindrops weeping from the ancient stone eyes of Ravenscroft’s gargoyles sounded like a countdown when they splashed against the ground below, as if the atmosphere might soon explode.
Caleb drifted through the manor with a semblance of melancholia to disguise the fact that he’d managed to get lost looking for the drawing room. It was there that the company were to meet for a little pre-dinner gathering Lady Ruperta had arranged, according to the butler, Grimshaw, who’d announced the fact like one announced the date of a funeral—lugubriously, but with a promise of drinks and snacks. They were ostensibly celebrating yet another room of antiques having been assessed and cataloged, and Caleb suspected that Lady Ruperta was hoping the event would serve as a farewell for the academics. He hoped the same. Either way, after thisinterminable assignment, he was seriously looking forward to a dab of expensive pâté on a minuscule cracker. And several glasses of wine.
Mind you, that would be meager solace in the face of not having been able to touch Amelia these past days. During their first week at the manor, Caleb had feared his health would suffer from not being able to mingle his fingers with hers, brush back her hair, or pretend to remove lint from her shirtwaist. But now, he knew real suffering. The places where she’d stroked him ached with a desperate longing that not even his own hand could assuage. The loneliness of his lips made him want to cry out. Were it not for the volume of Keats’s poetry he’d brought with him, he’d probably not have survived.
And now he could not find his way. It was altogether tragic. By the time he eventually reached the drawing room, most of the food and the best subjects of conversation would be taken. And romanticizing the experience of being lost only worked until you accepted that you reallywerelost. Opening a door to reveal yet another unoccupied room, Caleb resigned himself to starvation and wandered in.
Incredibly, the room, although large, was empty but for a dusty velvet chaise lounge and a grand piano that appeared to be made of oak and diaphanous light. Not a single antique blighted the view. Caleb perked up slightly. Walking across just for the pleasure of not having to wind a path through stacked books, boxes of dishware, and statuary, he lifted the piano’s fallboard and gazed down at the keys. They were spotless, as if this were the sole item in the house that someone cared to clean.
His hand hovered over the keys, hesitant. It was a stronghand, pale from a career spent indoors, but somehow in this moment, against the piano’s ivory perfection, he could see the ghosts of scratches all over it, black with dirt from the stable filth he’d handled every day as a child, scraping horseshit from corners a broom couldn’t easily reach, just to earn a penny.
These days he kept the nails manicured, the hands safe and comfortable in his pockets as often as he could, although good society deplored such a habit. And actually, most of the time he forgot those old grim days. Touching Amelia helped. She was his balm. But the piano keys daunted him just a little. Of course he would not besmirch them if he reached for music, and yet…
Laying his right hand so gently on the keys they made no sound, he took a deep breath, then shifted his gaze to the nearby window. Outside, the early evening countryside was more beautiful than a landscape painting in a museum. Trees smoldered with autumn colors against the dimming light. The sky was polluted by nothing worse than a cloud wandering lonely. Looking out at such countryside, a man might suppose he’d never enjoy the comforts of civilization again. He’d become a rustic, with soiled shoes and a dire lack of good-quality starch for his shirt collars. He’d grow so bored, he’d take to chewing books for entertainment. If, that is, he didn’t fade away into spectral semi-existence from handling too many thaumaturgic antiques.
Or perish outright from his longing to kiss Amelia just one more time.
But Caleb knew what to do with unpleasant thoughts. He was expert at it, and expended little mental energy in burying them within a coffin of self-mockery. Then donning a pensive smile like a man about to have his portrait taken, he lookeddown once more to the piano’s keys and, with his right hand, played a slow, quiet tune.
“Oh, my,” came a woman’s voice from behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see Amelia, Caleb was disappointed to find instead Lady Ruperta standing beside the chaise lounge. She clutched the rim of its curved mahogany back as if fearing she might faint.
To be fair, Caleb’s music tended to do that to people.
How the woman had entered the room and crossed the parquet floor to the chaise without Caleb having heard her, he did not know. She’d added to her usual funereal ensemble a black lace shawl that did little to ease the impression of chill about her, and a ruby brooch was affixed to her throat (or, more precisely—and less painfully—to a black ribbon around her throat) like a drop of blood. But her eyes were oddly bright, and a few strands of hair had gone awry in her coiffure, as if she’d been out in the breeze, or at least standing at an open window frowning with disapproval at the breeze. She directed that frown now at Caleb, and it was plain she still held a grudge about the dining table’s destruction, which seemed rather unreasonable considering it had happened more than a week ago.
Unworried, Caleb smiled at her, his charm engaging automatically. “Forgive me for playing your piano,” he said. “I can never resist, when I see one.”
Lady Ruperta’s visage became so arch, it could have served as a war memorial. “But you clearly can,” she replied, “since it is evident you’ve never taken a lesson.”
