“Lady Ruperta is going to make you more than uncomfortable when she sees what you’ve done to her secret door. Why didn’t you just push it open gently?”
“I did.”
“Um,” Amelia disputed.
“Iwantedto use an ax,” he said, “but the servants probably would have charged me a year’s worth of salary to borrow one.” His embrace tightened. “I’d have broken down the entire house to get to you.”
She laughed. “Please quit your job as a teacher and become a poet instead.”
“Terrible idea. All my poems would be titled ‘Amelia,’ and I’d be disparaged as a one-trick pony.”
The flutters beneath her heart perked up, wondering if they should take action, but Amelia assured them this was nothing compared to how Caleb usually spoke to her.Ooh,they answered dreamily, and shook themselves so that a velvety gold feeling billowed through her. She smiled against the privacy of Caleb’s shoulder.
“Were you hurt?” he asked, his voice low with concern.
“Not at all. Where are we?” The room in which they stood appeared to be empty of all but a chaise lounge and piano, and its lack of old clutter made her instantly worried that they’d stepped out of time or into a whole other house.
“We’re just down from the Mauve Drawing Room.”
This answer, along with the manner in which his hand was stroking her back, soothed Amelia completely. She could have stood for hours, resting against him, being petted. “You didn’t go far,” he said. “I’d suspected this room had a hidden door, so once I figured out that you were inside the walls, I came to look for it. Only a few minutes have—”
“A few minutes!” Amelia interjected with a horrified gasp. She pulled away from him, scowling around the room as if she could locate the lost time and reclaim it, along with a few extra seconds in compensation for her trouble. “We’ll never catch Vanity now.”
“But we know where she’s heading,” Caleb reminded her. “And it’s unlikely that she knows her way around the uni. We’ll take a morning train and be back in Oxford before she even finds her way to Balliol College, let alone to Dervorguilla’s brooch.”
“If we manage to escape this house,” Amelia added grimly. “Right now, that feels impossible.”
“I don’t know if the locket is to blame or not,” Caleb said, “but why don’t we just put it down somewhere and leave without it?”
Amelia shook her head. “No, that doesn’t feel wise. Such an incredibly strong binding power…Lady Ruperta was right, Sir Nigel is a terrible person to have power like that anywhere within his reach.”
“True. He might use it to trap someone in a room and talkat them for hours. Let’s at least put it in a safe bag. That should repress the magic.”
They went up a back stairwell to the first floor and within a few minutes were in Caleb’s bedroom, evidently with the locket’s approval. Caleb found a safe bag among the mess Vanity had created, while Amelia restrained herself with some difficulty from tidying up. “Right, put it in,” Caleb said, holding open the little black bag.
Bringing out the locket, Amelia opened it to check that the strange dental cargo was still inside. “You’re right,” she told Caleb as she contemplated the rotten lump. “It is disgusting.”
“I wonder who it belonged to,” Caleb mused.
Amelia wrinkled her nose. “I don’t c—”
“Merde!”
King John’s ghost suddenly materialized in the room, screaming with such force that Amelia and Caleb staggered backward. He raised his sword in both hands, slicing the air as if trying to cut through heaven in order to slaughter them. It created a whirling maelstrom of supernatural wind, ice-cold with antiquity, howling with grief for long-lost time. Clothes took wild flight. Books, candles, toiletries shot across the room, smashing against walls before bursting into vivid blue flames. Sheets arose from the bed like ghosts.
Amelia and Caleb exchanged a mild look.
“Merde!”King John cried again, his voice breaking with desperation.
Amelia blinked, struck by a sudden realization. “Oh! I’ve been mistaking his accent. He’s not sayingmerde. He’s sayingma dent!”
“Ma dent?”Caleb echoed dubiously. “I don’t know, they sound quite different.”
“It’s been almost seven hundred years since he was alive. Accents change.”
“I suppose. We could ask Throck— Okay, no need to kill me with that eyebrow, thank you. I studied Latin, not French; what doesma denteven mean?”
“This,” Amelia said, and taking the tooth from the locket, she threw it at King John.
