Shadow Though it Be:  An Excursus – Chapter 10

by L. Inman

 

The next morning Giles came downstairs, robed and tousle-haired, and went into the kitchen to make himself some toast.  As the toaster primed, he peered into the livingroom through the bar, to see if Elisabeth was awake yet.  She wasn’t.  Over her still head shone the single lamp; she had never turned it off after going to bed.  But then, he remembered suddenly, she had said she always slept with a light on.

            The toast popped up; he put it on a plate and buttered it, then poured himself a small glass of juice.  He carried the glass and the plate out to his desk and turned on a light.  He sat down and went through his notes from the previous day, alternately munching and sipping.  It was fruitless, really.  He had discovered nothing about Elisabeth’s home dimension, let alone a way to forge a link to send her there.  After a few desultory minutes hatching and cross-hatching in the margins of his notebook, he gave up and took the plate and glass back into the kitchen to rinse.

            Elisabeth was still asleep.  It was a good sign, he supposed, that she had sprawled a bit more comfortably than he had found her two mornings before.  Her bare feet peeped out from under the blanket; one derelict hand rested curled beside her ear.  Perhaps when he woke her this time, it wouldn’t instigate one of her attacks.

            And, with any luck, perhaps she would wake up on her own.

            Giles went upstairs, gathered together his clothing, and came back down to hit the shower.  He took his sweet time about it; he was achingly tired, his head hurt him, and on balance he would have preferred to stay in bed till the sun was much higher in the sky.  As he dressed, he paused to rub his chin and decided to forgo shaving; it would be one less chore out of the morning, and anyway his beard had not grown very much since last evening.  Buttoning his collar, he opened the door and made his way down the hall.

            Elisabeth was still not awake.

            Giles looked at his watch.  He had time to make himself a cup of coffee.  Another twenty minutes, and then he would wake her.

            The coffee-making noises did not wake Elisabeth:  Good God, Giles thought, taking his first sip, she must be half-dead.  He resolved to stay in the kitchen with his coffee and not go in to stare at her.  No one, he thought, likes to wake up to somebody staring at one.

            The twenty minutes were up.  Giles dumped out the last of his coffee and went into the livingroom.  She was still heavily asleep; he sighed and resigned himself to the inevitable.  “Elisabeth,” he said, bending over her.

            Her face stirred a little, but she did not wake.  “Elisabeth,” he said again.

            She groaned without waking and turned her face away toward the back of the couch. 

            He spoke her name again, and reached tentatively for her shoulder.  She was lying on her back, so that it was difficult to get hold of it; but he managed to slide his hand gently between her shoulder and the pillow and shake her lightly.

            “Elisabeth...wake up.”

            She groaned again.  He shook her a little harder.  She opened her eyes a fraction.  Muttered:  “Giles?”

            “Yes, it’s me.”

            “Giles?”

            “Yes.”   He paused in shaking her.

            “Go away.”

            He smiled a little.  “Sorry.  You’ve got to get up.”

            “No....”  She moaned and tried to turn over onto her face, but he wouldn’t let her.  “No you don’t,” he said.  “Come on.  Wake up.”

            “I may have to hurt you,” she murmured.

            “Well, you have to get up first.”  Giles joggled her by both shoulders.  “Come on now.”

            “Why?”  She opened her eyes again.  “Something wrong?”  This idea seemed to wake her up faster; her eyes opened nearly all the way, and she looked up, searching his face.  “What is it?  What’s wrong?”

            “Nothing’s wrong,” Giles said, reluctantly.  “It’s only that you’ve got to get up now.  I’m taking you to the magic shop with me.”

            “Don’t want to,” she said, letting her head fall back again and shutting her eyes.  “Go away.”

            “You have to.”

            “Why?”

            “Research, remember?  Marching orders, remember?”

            “No,” Elisabeth said.  Giles decided she meant that she was choosing not to remember.  It was time to take drastic action.  Grasping her by the upper arms, he pulled her up into a limp sitting position.  “Come on now,” he grunted.  “I know you remember.  You said you wanted to help with the research, and I said you could, and you said to let you know when—and I said—”

            “And you yourself have said it, and it’s greatly to your credit,” Elisabeth murmured.  She held up her head and opened her eyes blearily.  “For you are an Englishman.”

            “Yes, so they tell me,” Giles said, rolling his eyes.  “Are you awake now?”

            “Yes,” she said, “no thanks to you.  Heartless bastard.”

            “You have enough time to get dressed,” Giles said.

            He let go of her, and she swung her feet down from the couch to the floor.  “Do I have time to take a bath?”

            “No.”

            “Completely heartless.”

            Wisely, Giles got out of her way so that she could dig in her pack for clothing and toiletries, get to her feet, and flatfoot her way down the hall to the bathroom.  Some fifteen minutes later she emerged, fully dressed and combed, if a bit rumpled—and went to her pack to put away her pajamas.  He stowed books in his satchel and watched from the corner of his eye as she unrolled an unwieldy bit of black cloth that turned out to be a worn bookbag and began stuffing books and CDs into it.  That done, she hitched the shapeless thing on her shoulder and presented herself.  “Here I am,” she grunted.

            “Excellent,” he said, shouldering his own satchel and grabbing his keys.

 

*

 

In the car, neither of them said much of anything.  Elisabeth maintained a dead stare, blinking only occasionally and saying nothing at all, except for three grunts and an “okay” in response to Giles’s forays into conversation.  Not that he was trying very hard; he felt very much the way Elisabeth looked.

            Giles let them in at the back of the magic shop.  Elisabeth made her way ahead of him through the darkened back rooms, until he nudged her from behind and showed her to a book-and-file-laden table, which he cleared somewhat for her to sit down.  She plopped down in the chair he drew up for her, let her bag fall from her shoulder to the floor, and pulled off her glasses.  Though she left her eyes open, she heard more than saw him go into the front room and begin to move things—a few clinks here, the sound of pouring water, the thump of books, the rollercoaster sound of the cash register drawer.

            Presently he returned to the back room and flipped on the light.  Fortunately for her the light was dim, so she stifled her groan.  He placed on the table before her a mug; when she reached for it, she found it to contain a steaming quantity of black coffee, which she sipped at without comment.

            Some minutes later he came to her with a large stack of books and maneuvered them onto the table.  “These are for you,” he told her.

            She put down her coffee and lifted the top one off the stack.  “Do I know what I’m looking for?” she asked him.

            He smiled wryly.  “No.”

            “Wouldn’t be the first time,” she said, as he disappeared through the doorway.

            Elisabeth resumed her glasses and settled herself down with the first book, her coffee, and a pad and pencil.  And promptly found herself nodding.  This would never do.

            She dug into her bag for her headset and a CD.  Something energetic:  Joan Osborne, perhaps.  She settled the earpieces in her ears, slipped in the CD, and pressed play.  This was a bit better.  She took another lingering sip of coffee and returned to the book, sighing to herself.  This one was not a demonology but a listing of known dimensions and their qualities.  Elisabeth had a feeling she was not going to find her dimension in it, but she was game.

            Some ten minutes later, she was working on the second volume of the dimension index and humming faintly with the music.  A few times Giles passed across her peripheral vision, carrying a file, or a cardboard box filled with rattling merchandise, or a stack of books.  A few times she took a deep pull at her coffee.  She was just beginning to wake up in earnest when two things happened almost at once.

            Giles reappeared in the back room, a sheaf of notes under his arm, and approached her.  She looked up at him in silent query, pausing the music and pulling the earpieces out of her ears.  “Any luck so far?” he said.

            “Not yet.”

            He pulled off his glasses and fumbled around the sheaf of notes to find his pocket and pull out his handkerchief.  She watched him attempt to rub the lenses with the handkerchief without taking the papers from under his arm, realize that this was totally infeasible, and transfer the papers to the top of her stack of books before returning to his lens-cleaning ritual.  “Do you want more coffee?” he asked her, glancing up from his little task.

            Elisabeth nipped her little smile in the bud.  “No; I’m good,” she said.

            “Well, there’s more coffee in the other room, if you want any.”  He turned the handkerchief over one-handed and went at a particular spot inside the right lens of his glasses.

            “You know what really works for that?” she said suddenly.

            “Hmm?”  His eyes flickered, but he did not quite glance up.

            “Shampoo.”

            He blinked and looked up at her.  “Shampoo for what?”

            “For cleaning glasses,” she said. 

            “Really,” he said, staring at her.

            “Oh, yeah,” she said.  “You take a bit of shampoo on your fingers with a little water, and clean the lenses with them.  Then you wash it off and wipe the glasses dry, and you’re good for at least a couple of days.”

            “Really,” he said.

            “My mother taught me that,” she said.  “I shed a lot of oil, so I need more than a handkerchief to really get them clean.”  She looked at him slyly.  “Of course, nothing can quite replace the eloquent statement one can make by cleaning one’s glasses at random.”

            One corner of his mouth twitched, and his color rose a very little; but all he said was:  “I’ll have to try your technique.”

            It was then that the second thing happened. 

            A bell tinkled somewhere, followed by a clackety-spat of footsteps—women’s shoes, coming their way.  Though they were both expecting it, Anya’s irruption into the back room was still startling.  She was shedding her cardigan and talking fast on her way through the door.  “Sorry I’m late, Giles,” she said.  “I was…well, I was—you know—”  Her hand waved, searching for the right gesture.

            He spoke before she could find it.  “In any case, I’m very glad you’re here.  We have a great deal of work to do.”

            Anya noticed Elisabeth for the first time.  “Who’s this?” 

            “Oh,” Giles said.  “That is one of the things I meant to—  Anya, this is Elisabeth.  Elisabeth: Anya.”

            “Oh right,” Anya said, brightening.  “Xander told me about you.”  She turned to Giles.  “How come all the exciting stuff happens on my day off?”

            Giles cleared his throat.  “I have no idea.”

            “I’m going to get the shop set up for our customers,” Anya said, and bustled back into the front room, the curtain billowing behind her.

            “Anya should be careful what she wishes for,” Elisabeth said quietly into her book.

            Giles frowned.  “You’d think as a former vengeance demon she’d know better.  You’re right.  I’ll have to leave someone with her if I ever decide to take a day off.”

            Elisabeth cleared her throat and managed to say nothing.  Avoiding Giles’s gaze, she buried herself in volume two of An Almanack of Dimensions.

            “I’m going to help Anya,” Giles said, gathering up his papers again, “and then I’m coming back to join you.”

            She nodded, already halfway deep into the book again.

            True to his word, Giles returned a while later, bearing his own stack of books, and cleared a space at the table across from her.  For a while they worked silently; Giles sipped occasionally at his coffee, and Elisabeth moved her lips to her music.

            As Elisabeth had predicted, there was no mention of her dimension in the Almanack.  She thumped the three-volume set aside in the pile of rejects and grabbed another book, this one a history of transdimensional spells.  Surely there would be something in here that might be useful.  She took up her pencil and turned pages, reading through account by account, spell by spell.  But the further she read, the more her skepticism recoiled at the mechanics of these spells.  What was so significant about placing five candles in a circle and chanting bad poetry?  How was that supposed to help?  According to these accounts, it did—and if Giles took it seriously, she felt she had to give it some credence.  And yet—

            A nuisance strand of Elisabeth’s hair was dripping out of her ponytail and into her face.  She kept wiping it away, but it slipped down again almost immediately each time she did.  Finally, frustrated with the book, her hair, and the search in general, she pulled off her glasses and her earpieces and dropped the pencil back onto the empty pad. 

            Her explosive sigh brought Giles’s head up.  He adjusted his glasses and looked at her with the sort of thin-lipped amusement that got her goat immediately.

            “Giving up already?” he said.

            She glared at him.  “No,” she said, with dignity.  “I’m a scholar, I have some stamina.  But I was just thinking—” she hadn’t meant to say this in case it was impolitic, but now she didn’t care— “that I don’t see how lighting five candles in a circle and chanting bad poetry is going to help anything.”

            His mouth quirked into an incensing little smile.  “How about six candles and some good poetry—John Donne, perhaps?”

            “That’s an English major’s idea of a hot night,” Elisabeth said, her eyebrows lofty.  “But I don’t think it’s any more likely to enable a person to cross dimensional lines.”

            He was laughing. 

            “I’m serious, dammit,” Elisabeth said.

            He hooted at this.  “Of course you are,” he managed to say.

            She folded her arms and waited for him to recover himself.  Eventually, he removed his glasses and wiped at his face with his handkerchief, and said, grinning at her with amused bare eyes:

            “So you find it difficult to give credence to a circle of candles and bad poetry.  I can respect that.  But magicians aren’t poets, you know.”

            “More’s the pity,” she sniffed.

            He smiled again and put his glasses back on.

            She gathered her courage and pressed on:  “But that isn’t my biggest objection, you know.”

            “Oh?” Giles was folding his handkerchief.

            “It isn’t just the form of the ritual; it’s the ritual itself.”  She wiped her hair out of her face and leaned forward earnestly.  “I admit my experience is of a different kind.  But the rituals I know—the ones in the Church—they’re meant for the humans, they’re not meant for the higher powers.  I mean, God doesn’t give a rat’s ass if I—” she waved a hand in search of an example— “turn around three times and spit when I make a request.  If I do a funny ritual like that, I do it because it connects my consciousness somehow with what’s going forward.  But to use a ritual to accomplish something in itself—to have some purpose not go forward because one leaves out a word, or moves one’s hand at the wrong time—it’s—a manipulation—like a key in a lock—”  She stopped, her face losing color.  He wasn’t laughing anymore.

            She paled even further as she recognized the impact of her last phrase on him.  She sat back in her chair and forced herself to take a breath.

            He pinned her down with his eyes and said quietly:  “I understand your point of view.  I even share it, to an extent.  But tell me this:  how is technology any different?”

            (A man of courageous reason, thank God.)

            “It isn’t,” she said, thinking hard.  “But…I can see—there’s a link there, a match—between the experiment and the result—”

            “Which is born of long familiarity,” he said.

            She leaned forward again.  “Is that all it is?”

            She watched his face:  one eyebrow went up, shrugging.  He was giving it back to her, damn him.  She flushed.

            “I’m not the one who should be answering.  I’m not the one who has to fight fire with fire,” she said.

            “But you provoked the question,” he pointed out.

            “I know I did.  I don’t know what I was thinking.”  She wiped her hair out of her face (a fruitless gesture), and folded her arms again.

            He shook his head, the little smile creeping up once more.  “You’re doing it again.”

            “Doing what?”

            “Throwing the game away.”

            She primmed her lips hard and said:  “Far better to throw it away than lose—or win a Pyrrhic victory—”

            “And yet you’re not a coward,” he said coolly.

            She inhaled sharply.  “Or hurt my opponent,” she finished.

            He pulled off his glasses.  “A ridiculous nicety,” he said, “—one which you would do well to jettison from your so-called arsenal.”

            “Well, now, there’s a mouthful.”  She sat back and breathed for a minute.

            He waited, fingering the earpiece of his glasses with his thumb, not yet putting them back on.

            Elisabeth felt the need to temporize.  “What were we talking about, again?”

            The touch of humor returned to his face.  He put his glasses back on.  “We were talking,” he said, “of the similarities between magic and technology.”

            “Seems like such a meek subject,” she said.

            “Not really.” 

            “Damn you,” she said.

            He chuckled.  “So have you an answer for me?” he said.

            She stared levelly at him for a long moment, then answered:  “Yes.  Technology is rarely capricious in nature, unless you count chaos theory, which I don’t.  Magic, on the other hand, is eminently capricious, unstable, subject to the whims of sentient and possibly amoral beings, and for that reason doubly dangerous.”

            “Well, I certainly agree with that last,” Giles said.  “Magic certainly shouldn’t be practiced by amateurs who have no respect for that truth—certainly not by the majority of the general population.”

            “Said the proprietor of a magic shop,” Elisabeth said, looking over her glass-rims at him.

            He smiled: a real, honest smile.  “A touch, a touch, I do confess’t.”

            She smiled back.

            “Nice to see you didn’t pull back on that one,” he said, then glanced aside.  “Yes, Anya?”

            Startled, Elisabeth turned to see that Anya was standing waiting in the doorway for an opening to speak.  “I can come back,” Anya said.

            “No, no.”  He waved her in.

            “It’s just that I had a question about the inventory….”

            “Right,” he said, getting up.  “Shall we continue when I return?” he asked Elisabeth.

            “Certainly,” Elisabeth said.  “I’ll hit the books, and study up on the Marquis of Queensberry rules.”

            He chuckled and made his departure with Anya.

            Elisabeth plopped back in her chair, letting out the breath she didn’t know she had kept pent up.  It took all of the time that Giles was gone for her to stop shaking enough to pick up the next book and make a serious shot at reading it.

            When he returned and took his seat, Elisabeth was firmly ensconced in her chair, now turning the pages of Sodayn Apearances.  This book had at least the amusing novelty of having been written in Chaucerian Middle English, and, being a sixteenth-century reprint, had woodcuts to match the fabulous stories in the text. 

            “‘And whanne that shadoe apered uppon the wall, she creyed out, God salve me, Benedicite!’” she read aloud, giving the vowels their full Middle-English weight in a voice of deep amusement.

            “Yes,” Giles said, glancing up, “I thought that one might prove amusing.”

            “Very,” she said.  “And much closer to my field.”

            “Which is, refresh my memory…?”  Giles wasn’t looking up from his manuscript, but she could tell he was listening, so she answered him.

            “The Romantics and the Victorians.”

            “Ah yes.  Revolution and syncretism.”

            “A few hundred years away from Chaucer, but who’s counting?”

            “Read any Latin?”

            “I have a faint grasp of the grammar, and I can gloss the cognates.  Which, I suppose, is like saying I know how the pieces move on a chessboard.”

            He smiled, still not looking up, and reached for a book on his pile.  “Add this to your assignment, then,” he said.

            She took the book without replying and placed it on her pile.

            After a moment he looked up.  “Aren’t you going to come at me with sticks?”

            “Nope,” Elisabeth said, turning another page of Sodayn Apearances.  “It’s your turn, Goliath.”

            “I’m afraid,” he said.

            Elisabeth gave this the snort it deserved and turned another page; except that the page came away in her hand.  “Uh-oh,” she said.  “There’s a page out.”

            “Oh, really?” he said, as one responds to the news of an acquaintance’s grave illness.

            “Yes.”  Elisabeth lifted the book gently and checked the binding.  “It’s strange,” she said.  “The binding seems okay.”

            “I thought I’d got them all,” Giles muttered.  “Some idiot picked up the book by the middle signature.”

            “No,” Elisabeth said, in genuine horror.

            “When the book came into my hands, the signature was practically pulled out altogether.  Horrible thing to do to a perfectly good binding.”

            “Well, we can at least tip the page back in,” Elisabeth said, sympathetically.  “Got any PVA?”

            He stared at her.  “You know what PVA is?”

            Elisabeth rolled her eyes.  “Hello, ex-library assistant.”

            “Right.  I forgot.  Yes, I have some.”  He got up and rummaged in a cabinet.  “Ah. Here we are.”  He came back to her with a small unlabeled squeeze bottle and a suede packet, and set them before her.  Elisabeth untied the suede strings and unfolded the packet to reveal a shining set of preservation tools.  “Wow,” she said.  “…An etched microspatula,” she added, sliding it out gingerly.  “You really do spare no expense, do you?”

            Giles folded his arms and shrugged.  “I found it cheap.”

            “Sure you did.”  She smirked over her shoulder at him, and flicked open the squeeze bottle.  “Do we have any water?”

            He gestured vaguely at the bottle:  “It’s already properly diluted.”

            “Ah.  Excellent.”  She was about to apply the nozzle to the flat of the microspatula when she became keenly aware of him leaning in behind her, tucking his tie out of the way.  “Why do I feel as if I’m in an exam?” she asked the room in general.

            Giles snorted.

            Elisabeth sighed, and went on with the task.  “Before my illness,” she said quietly, daubing imperceptible amounts of acrylic paste onto the ragged edge of the page with the tool, “my hands were a bit steadier.  It also,” she added, wiping excess paste delicately on the back of her finger, “helps not to have an audience studying my every move at close range.”

            He grunted softly behind her ear, but made no apology.

            Carefully, Elisabeth fitted the page into its place, using the other end of the tool to tuck the broken edges into symmetry.  She shut the book, eyed the lie of the closed pages, then opened it and adjusted the loose page before the paste could dry.  Then she handed the finished product to him.

            He held the book partly open and tickled the pages with two long fingers.  “Nice job,” he said, making a wry-mouth shrug.  “Though you could have avoided leaving this blob of paste on the binding…joking, I was joking!” he laughed, as she threatened him with the pointy end of the microspatula.

            Elisabeth was cleaning up when Anya returned to the back room.  “Do we have any more newt tails?”

            “No,” Giles said, cleaning his glasses, “we’re out.”

            “Okay, I’ll tell them.  Oh…I’d wondered what ritual those tools were for,” she said, watching Elisabeth slide the microspatula back into its place.

            “It’s not a ritual,” Giles said, in his best longsuffering voice.

            “Sure it is,” Elisabeth said, grinning.

            “So is this a librarian initiation?” Anya asked her, grinning back.

            “No,” Elisabeth said, “just the usual morning sacrifice of paste.”

            “Ah.”  Anya giggled, then caught sight of Giles’s face.  “Okay, going now.”

            “Next time you come back here,” Elisabeth called after her, “I’ll instruct you in the Mysteries of the Bone Folder.”

            Anya’s wicked laughter echoed back to them and mingled with Giles’s extra-strength snort.

            Elisabeth turned around and handed back to him his preservation tools.  “What?” she said, catching sight of his expression.  “I just can’t resist the bawdy preservation jokes.”

            “Yes,” he groaned, “but do you have to make them with Anya?  I’ll never hear the end of it now.”

            “That,” Elisabeth said, “was the plan, Goliath.”

            He snatched the suede case out of her hands with another great snort; but he couldn’t quite hide the twitch in his mouth.

            It wasn’t till they were both reseated and settled back to researching that Giles asked her abruptly:  “So what will you do if our efforts end by integrating you fully into this dimension?”

            She looked up, startled; thought it over.  “I don’t know.  Leave, certainly.”

            “Really?”  His face was impassive, which she knew meant that his questions tended toward a definite end.  She chose her answer carefully.

            “Yes.  I can’t stay here for very long.  It’s—it’s all a very delicate balance, and I can’t risk upsetting it by remaining in the mix.”

            “Where will you go?” he asked her, thoughtfully.

            “I don’t know…L.A., perhaps.  Find a corner of it that’s not Angel’s turf and settle down for a while.  Or, just keep moving.  I have time.”  She sighed.  “I have nothing but time.”

            Giles examined the book she’d mended before weighting it down beneath his pile of rejects.  “Of course, you can probably make yourself useful here.”

            “Giles, please be serious.  You’re under siege here, you must know that already.  I’m a liability, any way you slice it.”

            “You’re sure of it?” he asked, looking at her mildly.

            She blinked suddenly.  “You’re feeling me out,” she said.  “You’re looking for clues to the upcoming battle.”  For a moment, a small surge of anger went through her.  She let it pass, staring him straight in the eye; he did not blink, nor did he try to deny it.  Her anger finished, and cooled.  She drew a long breath and let it out in a great sigh.

            “You need knowledge, it’s true,” she said quietly.  “But you need each other more.  And if I stay here for the duration...well—” she shook her head apprehensively, staring across the open book in front of her— “talk about queering the pitch.”

            A little silence reigned, and lasted.  “About that,” Giles said uncomfortably.

            She looked up at him.

            “I—” He paused, took off his glasses, realized what he was doing, made as if to put them back on, and finally gave up and laid them down on the table.  “I’m not sure what I was thinking of.  I really—you’re not in the easiest of straits, and I should have been paying closer attention to—”

            “To what, exactly?” Elisabeth said, biting back a smile.

            “To the ramifications,” he said pointedly.

            “The ramifications of what?”  Elisabeth was not about to let him off easy.

            “The ramifications of what you just said.  The web of consequences—and what you haven’t said, its effect on you.  You’ve been ill, you’re exhausted, you’re split between worlds—”

            “Oh, hold on,” Elisabeth said.  “Let me get this straight.  You’re perfectly willing to checkmate me ruthlessly again and again for an entire evening—but you’ve developed scruples about kissing me?”

            He shot a glance at the curtained doorway, as if afraid Anya might hear her.  “It’s different,” he said, attempting to be quiet and intense at the same time.  “That was a game—” he stopped abruptly, realizing that was an invalid claim, and switched tracks— “of relative insignificance.  And I was teaching you to play.  You don’t seriously suggest that I was—”

            “Of relative insignificance,” Elisabeth repeated.  “That’s cute.”

            He looked sharply up at her.

            “I mean it,” she said.  “It’s flattering that you found the thing more significant than the literal chessboard, and amusing that you think that requires you to be more solicitous.  It’s cute.”  She looked at him levelly.  “And wholly unnecessary, not to mention hopelessly Victorian.”

            “But—”

            “Didn’t you just get through lambasting me for pulling punches?”

            “Are you suggesting that kisses and punches are the same thing?”

            “Aren’t they?”

            “No!”

            “Yes they are,” she said.  “They’re points of contact.  Significant points of contact: and if one’s going to engage, one might as well not fool around, and play it to the hilt—” She stopped, flushing hot.  “...Well, that was an unfortunate phrasing—but—you—you know what I mean—”

            He cast down his eyes, but did not attempt to hide his smile.

            “Listen,” she said, recovering, “I can deal with the chessmaster, and I can deal with the Victorian gentleman, but I can’t deal with you trying to be both at once.  Pick a role, and stick with it.”

            He raised his eyes, smiling fully now.  “It appears to me that it is you who are picking my role.”

            She cocked an eyebrow, ignoring the sudden thready gallop of her pulse.  “Do you object?”

            “On the contrary,” he said, “I insist.”

            “That,” she said with satisfaction, “is much more like it.”

            “I’m glad you think so.”

            “Good.”

            “Right.”

            Elisabeth pushed her glasses up on her nose.  Giles resumed his, and they both reached for the next book on their respective piles.  And actually managed to get back to work.

 

*

 

Chapter 11

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