Then stopped, their jaws dropping.
Professor Ottersock stood on the other side of the threshold, his arms crossed, his scowl blurred by pipe smoke as he demanded, “What on earth is going on here?!”
Chapter Twenty-One
History teaches us that discord doesn’t happen
because people speak different languages, but because
they simply don’t want to listen.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
Professor Ottersock’s wordschilled Amelia so thoroughly, she felt as though she’d been turned to stone. In the gloom, with his pipe smoke and the large black umbrella he held overhead, he gave the impression of being more a dragon than a faculty—
Thud.
Yanking the door from Grimshaw’s hold, Caleb had slammed it shut before Amelia could realize what he was doing, let alone stop him. The sound of Ottersock’s shocked exclamation was heard through the wood, and Amelia pressed a finger against her brow, where the low-grade headache she’d been feeling all week now threatened a migraine.
“There is a small chance you probably shouldn’t have done that,” she told Caleb wearily.
“There is an even greater chance you’re right,” he agreed. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Fright?” Amelia suggested. “Anxiety?”
“Horror at his triple tweed outfit.” Releasing her hand fromhis grasp, he donned a rueful expression, straightened his shoulders with the air of Hector preparing to meet Achilles outside Troy, then reached for the door handle.
Grimshaw got there before him. With a scowl that had Caleb figuratively hung, drawn, and quartered for the crime of usurping a butler’s door-operation privileges, he opened the door once again.
“Good evening, sir,” he intoned to Professor Ottersock, although it was clear what he meant was,My apologies, I am in no way associated with these idiots.Ottersock, pipe bobbing and sideburns trembling, muttered something dour that sounded in turn like, “Apologies accepted, since Iamassociated with these idiots.” He bustled through the doorway before he might be shut out again, his umbrella dripping rain and bad luck all over the flagstones. As he closed it, Amelia and Caleb retreated several steps to avoid being “accidentally” smacked with said umbrella.
“You look like you’re about to leave,” he remarked as he scanned them and their luggage from beneath a hairy frown, proving why he was paid the big money (eighty pounds a year) to head a university faculty.
“Miss Tunnicliffe has stolen the teaspoon I st—er, discovered in Hereford Cathedral,” Amelia informed him. “She intends to use it to access Dervorguilla of Galloway’s brooch. We are about to undertake hot pursuit.”
“Cold pursuit, more like it,” Ottersock rebutted, “considering the weather. And I see magic is afoot,” he added, watching the footmen trying to shove the coat rack into a closet. “Why am I not surprised to find chaos happening in your vicinity? You’re not going anywhere tonight, Professor Tarrant.”
That, apparently, was that: his pipe smoke gave anautocratic billow, and Grimshaw took this as a signal to close the door.
“No!” Amelia said, forestalling the butler. “We must leave at once.”
“At once,” Caleb agreed.
“At once,”Grimshaw practically pleaded.
“You can’t just go running off into the night,” Ottersock said. “Especially since I have come all the way here to talk to you. Close the damn door and point me in the direction of the nearest teakettle.”
Grimshaw began swinging the door shut with an even more doleful expression than usual.
“Wait!” Amelia interjected. The butler froze once again. “We must stop Vanity before she steals the brooch!”
“Pff,” Ottersock scoffed. “Miss Tunnicliffe is just a girl with a mediocre education. She’s no danger to anyone.”
“She has a gun,” Caleb said tersely.
“And contacts in the black market,” Amelia added.
“And she’s smarter than she acts,” they concluded in unison.
