The Antiquarian's Object of Desire

Chapter One

In history, there is no single point of beginning.

I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock

It had just gone six o'clock in the evening and nothing had exploded yet. This was good news for the staff of the Minervaeum, London's premier club for academics, where arguments and experiments all too often detonated into chaos. They dared not relax, however, for the night was still young and the library full of historians. No one is more dangerous than people who have little interest in the future.

Some fifty gentlemen cluttered the somber, book-lined chamber, enjoying sherry, nibbles, and a haze of pipe smoke. A few dozed in leather armchairs, for they had been up since the twelfth century, academically speaking, to prepare for a symposium that commenced the next morning.

Only one woman was present, alone at a table in a corner. Several books lay open before her, and she consulted them as she wrote page after page of notes. Lamplight dappled with rain shadows from a nearby window flickered over her tightly bound dark hair and black dress, making her seem evanescent, like a ghost trying to research a way back into life.

"Who is that charming creature?" asked Mr. Beaulieu, a junior professor who had come over from Paris for the symposium. Studying the woman's quiet poise as she sipped from a dainty porcelain cup, and noting in particular the lack of a wedding ring, he felt something stir in his heart where before there had been only midterm breaks and Brie cheese.

"That's Amelia Tarrant," Mr. Dummersby of the British Museum told him. It sounded rather the same as that's a Viking ship coming toward us.

Beaulieu's eyes widened. "The antiquarian professor from Oxford University?"

Dummersby nodded solemnly. "Correct."

"Mon Dieu!" Beaulieu reared back, crossing himself. "In France we call her La Terrifiante Erudite."

"In England we try not to call her anything, in case she hears us."

They regarded the woman from behind the safety of their pipes. She set down her tea to stir it before laying the teaspoon on a napkin and taking another sip. Her eyes closed at the taste.

"She looks so genteel," Beaulieu remarked rather wistfully.

"Looks can be deceiving," Dummersby warned. "I once paid her a compliment and she's refused to work with me ever since."

"No!"

"Yes. I ask you, what kind of woman doesn't like being told by a colleague that she has beautiful lips? And last week she argued with Professor Sterling over a magical candlestick, causing a fire that nearly burned down the Ashmolean Museum."

"Mon Dieu!"

Dummersby gave a shrug that said quite plainly, it's all you can expect from antiquarians. They were forever causing drama with magical antiques instead of just quietly reading about drama like proper historians.

"Sterling," Beaulieu mused. "Isn't he the one who found Jane Seymour's lost ghost in a jewelry box?"

"That's him. He and Tarrant are fierce enemies."

"Fascinating," Beaulieu murmured, eyeing Amelia once again. Then the library door swung open, admitting bright light from the corridor beyond and dazzling his attention. Beaulieu turned to see a man enter, reading a book as he walked.

Beaulieu gasped, for the newcomer was scandalously close to being naked. Clad in nothing more than trousers and an open-collared shirt, he had no pomade in his blond hair, not even the merest hint of a mustache anywhere about him, and worse, his fingernails were polished with a red tint. Beaulieu had never seen the like before, and was uncomfortably interested.

The man looked up from his book and, discovering a crowd of historians staring at him, blinked with surprise. "Good heavens," he remarked mildly. "What have you done to the kitchen?"

"It's next floor down," someone called out.

"Oh." He paused, seemingly hoping that the library might transform itself into a kitchen if he but waited a moment. Then he caught sight of the buffet table and, with a shrug, headed for it. Historians scattered from his path.

"Who is he?" Beaulieu whispered rather trepidatiously.

"That," Dummersby intoned, "is Professor Caleb Sterling."

Clink.

At the small, sharp sound, both historians jolted. Amelia Tarrant had set her cup down in its saucer. She stared across the room at Sterling.

THUD.

Now the entire gathering jolted as Sterling slammed his book shut. He stared back at Amelia.

Beaulieu had considered himself an expert on the Black Death until this moment, seeing the expression in Sterling's eyes. Amelia, for her part, did not even blink.

"Oh dear," Dummersby murmured. "Here we go again . . ."


Amelia watched coolly as Caleb approached. He took his time, pausing now and again to chat with people in the crowd, but he flashed her dark glances just to prove himself an absolute villain. She frowned in reply.

She'd not seen him since the Ashmolean incident. After the flames had been extinguished and the museum's curators settled with tea and biscuits, she'd been summoned by Professor Ottersock, head of Oxford's Material History faculty, and she'd made her attitude clear to him.

"I hate the man," she declared (albeit in the polite, gently modulated tones of a well-brought-up lady for whom hatred was something expressed only in strictest privacy). "I certainly did not intend to meet him in the museum at night. We argued, which is how the candlestick got dropped. It won't happen again, I can assure you."

In response, Ottersock just looked at her over the glass of laudanum he was about to drink for his sudden migraine.

"Sterling is a scoundrel," Amelia added for good measure. And then, worried that she'd gone too far-"He's also an excellent historian and valued colleague, of course."

"Sit down, Tarrant," Ottersock said wearily, gesturing at a chair in front of his desk. "Talk to me about what's going on for you."

Good God. Amelia had not become an expert antiquarian and professor at the age of twenty-six by having conversations. "I'm fine," she said, which was as emphatic an end to the matter as any British person could provide.

Ottersock sighed and scratched at his bushy gray sideburns. "Let me put it another way. I want to know what on earth you were thinking, young lady! Mishandling a thaumaturgic candlestick and causing a fire is one thing, but a girl should not be working alone in a museum after dark, let alone bantering with a male colleague!"

"Arguing," Amelia corrected him.

"Engaging in private intercourse," he corrected her right back, with all the authority of a faculty head and older white male.

Amelia was so alarmed by this definition she nearly gasped aloud. She'd barely escaped losing her position at Oxford earlier this year due to Caleb Sterling. Although they had been friends since they met as eight-year-olds in boarding school, the moment Professor Throckmorton from Medieval Studies caught them hugging, that became impossible.

Throckmorton, caring not that Caleb had merely been consoling her after she received news of her grandfather's death, had spread such malicious gossip that Amelia was officially told to either marry Caleb or quit her professorship. After all, just because women had been admitted to tertiary education after Queen Charlotte demanded it a hundred years earlier didn't mean they were free to act like men. Heavens, if female academics started touching their male colleagues willy-nilly (so to speak), what would come next? Trousers on ladies?!

She'd survived the scandal, unmarried and employed, because no one would call Caleb and her friends these days. Indeed, they were the very model of foes. And yet still she felt her job in peril.

"I'm afraid I have no time to discuss the matter," she told Ottersock. "I'm going to Hereford to follow up on a clue about treasure in the cathedral there." Actually, she'd planned her departure for tomorrow, but getting out of town fast seemed the only way to avoid this talk. "My train leaves in two hours."

Ottersock choked on his laudanum. "What? You can't just run off! We haven't finished our discussion! Sit down!"

Driven to desperate measures, Amelia looked at her wristwatch, then raised big, imploring eyes to the faculty head. Alarm that she might start crying blazed across Ottersock's face.

"Fine," he grumped. "Go! And for God's sake, don't blow anything up!"

She'd gone, only returning this afternoon in time for the symposium-and with absolutely no awareness whatsoever that Caleb also was staying at the Minervaeum. Indeed, when Professor Jemeson from Cambridge University's Classics faculty waylaid her in a corridor to inform her of this ("Now, don't go burning down the club, little lady, ha ha . . . Say, want to come to dinner with me?"), Amelia had expressed complete surprise.

Unfortunately, Jemeson had not told her about the pre-symposium drinks being held in the library, and now here Caleb was, walking toward her through a crowd of people trained to tell stories. Amelia looked up to the ceiling's painted heaven, but its frolicking cherubs offered no inspiration. When she looked down again, Caleb was standing on the other side of the table, as if he'd magically folded space and time to reach her.

"Good evening, Mr. Sterling," she said in a prim voice.

"Miss Tarrant," he drawled. "Sitting alone in a corner, I see."

"Hoping to avoid unpleasant company," she replied pointedly.

He smirked. She stared. The atmosphere grew almost unbearably tense (perhaps because everyone in the library was holding their breath).

Then Caleb gave a dramatic sigh. Dropping into the chair opposite Amelia, he leaned forward, elbows on the table and chin set atop his linked fingers. His blue-eyed gaze seemed to twinkle behind wayward strands of hair. "Hello, Meely."

Amelia glanced at the historians behind him, who hastily looked away as if they possessed no interest whatsoever in the conversation. "Please leave, Mr. Sterling," she replied. "I'm trying to work."

"You needn't call me Mr. Sterling when we're alone." He grinned with appallingly winsome charm. "Professor will do fine."

How anyone could make such a respectable title sound indecent, Amelia did not know. "We aren't alone," she pointed out. "There are fifty other people in the room."

"When I'm with you, it feels as if the rest of the world vanishes."

Amelia rolled her eyes.

"Speaking of vanishing," he continued, "you fled after the Ashmolean fire-"

"I went to Hereford," she corrected him.

"I've been worried."

"Nonsense. You've been sleeping half the day and reading"-she angled her head to see the title of his book, and her nose wrinkled-"Byron."

"Of course I've been reading Byron," he retorted, as if it were obvious. "My best friend disappeared into the ether!"

"Sh!" Amelia glanced again at the crowd, but they had given up hope of scandal and returned to their conversations. "I only went out of town for a few days. That's hardly a good reason to succumb to Romantic poetry."

"Was it because I got my eyebrows shaped and you were overwhelmed by their beauty?" he asked with apparent sincerity.

Amelia tsked. "No, I-" She paused, looking at his eyebrows, and he grinned. She speared him with a frown, although only briefly, in case she hurt him for real. "Scoundrel. No, Professor Ottersock started asking too many questions, and I needed an excuse to get away. You know that if he realized the truth about us not actually being enemies, he'd immediately fire me. He hasn't budged from his notion that a male and female professor being bosom friends would bring Oxford into disrepute."

"Well if you're going to use a phrase like 'bosom friends' I can't say I blame him," Caleb said, then smiled again as her frown reappeared. "So when you sent me a note to meet here tonight, you weren't planning to tell me goodbye forever? And in public, where I couldn't make a scene?"

Amelia suppressed a laugh. "As if being in public ever deterred you from making a scene. No, I'm not planning to say goodbye. I wouldn't leave Oxford." She paused for the slightest of moments, then added, "My aunt Mary would get too lonely."

"Ah yes, poor Aunt Mary, with only her husband, your brother, your cousin, his wife, and your parents for company." He chuckled, and a dozen heads in the crowd whipped around to see what was happening and whether it signaled an imminent explosion.

"You are a pest!" Amelia declared at once in a strident voice.

Caleb straightened, shaking back his hair. "And you are poison!"

Murmuring, the crowd turned away again. Amelia and Caleb exchanged a look that mingled amusement, exasperation, and old remembrances-the kind of look only possible when you have known someone most of your life. No, Amelia corrected herself, "known" skimped on the truth. She didn't just know Caleb. He was deep inside her heart, the truest friend she'd ever had, her most favorite person in all the world.

He was not supposed to be. Society, faced with the minefield of co-ed schools, tolerated the opposite sexes being friends only so long as they never touched, never went anywhere alone together, and never progressed beyond the most polite of conversations.

Because of that, she and Caleb had, since adolescence, kept the richness of their friendship scrupulously hidden behind a facade of "just chums." But one slip had been all it took . . . one hug in a supposedly empty lane . . . to ruin everything. When Throckmorton went on his gossipmongering spree, their academic peers (generally speaking, a group of bookish old men who themselves had never been hugged, except that one time Mama was a bit drunk and feeling sentimental), were immediately ready with charges of seduction! misconduct! and making everyone else feel all hot and bothered!

Only a show of outright enmity had been able to stop the virulent rumors and ensure Amelia kept her reputation and her job, and Caleb kept his lifestyle as a wild, carefree bachelor (which mostly involved sleeping in late and adding bacon to every meal).

They'd become rather good at it; indeed, Caleb seemed to be having so much fun coming up with novel insults for her that Amelia didn't quite know whether to be entertained or offended. And the madcap scheme was actually working. Professor Ottersock complained daily about their antagonism, but he never guessed that Amelia and Caleb might be doing worse things than arguing; i.e., lounging next to each other on a sofa, drinking tea, and discussing their favorite types of biscuit.

Amelia could only suppose that society's fear of men and women being close friends originated with historical events, such as when Isabella of France chummied up to Roger Mortimer and together they invaded England, overthrowing the king, her husband. Otherwise, the whole nonsense was beyond her. Fortunately, she was an antiquarian, not a psychiatrist, because she found people utterly inexplicable.

Caleb leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the table, ankles crossed. Amelia stiffened, imagining the germs that were no doubt leaping from his shoes to populate her books. "What are you writing?" he asked.