by Jodi Taylor
‘I haven’t met her yet,’ he said.
‘If you push off now then you won’t have to,’ I said darkly, still seething.
Vast quantities of Archive boxes were piled outside TB2 waiting to be loaded and techies were scurrying up and down the ramp with tools and serious expressions. I gestured at the activity around us. ‘You’re not hanging around, are you?’
‘No point. The sooner I’m gone, the sooner I’m back.’
‘I thought you were taking Number Five.’
A word of explanation. Number Five is a pod. As is TB2. Pods are our means of travelling up and down the timeline. From the outside, they resemble small, stone-built shacks with flat roofs and no windows. The sort of timeless design that fits into any landscape at any time. They could be dwelling houses in Mesopotamia, huts in medieval France, or sheds on a modern allotment.
Inside, they’re small and cramped and smell horribly of cabbage. No one knows why. It’s a mystery. They can also smell of terrified historian, hot electrics and exploded toilet. Although that’s not a mystery.
Leon drew me aside. ‘How would you feel if I took Adrian and Mikey with me? I’m really not at all sure we want Hyssop – and by extension, her employers – knowing we have a couple of unregistered geniuses living with us. Are you?’
‘Good thought,’ I said. One of my nightmares is being held responsible for those two. Although I love them dearly. Most of the time.
‘And,’ he said, more slowly, ‘I’d like to take Matthew, as well.’
I opened my mouth to demand why and then closed it again. Mikey and Adrian are, both of them, a bit of a disastrous good ideas factory. By which I mean their ideas are mostly brilliant, but the world isn’t quite ready for some of them just yet. Most of them. All right, all of them. We definitely didn’t want either Adrian or Mikey or their ideas falling into the wrong hands.
The same arguments could apply to Matthew and his uncanny affinity with the Time Map. All Time Maps. Ours and the Time Police’s. The same arguments should apply to Matthew as Adrian and Mikey, it’s just . . . I’d rather looked forward to a little Max/Matthew time.
I hesitated.
‘I know,’ said Leon. ‘But it won’t be for long. And it’s not as if they won’t enjoy themselves. Mikey will have two or three brilliant ideas a day and Matthew and Adrian can build them. I’ll intervene occasionally as the voice of reason, sanity and survival.’
I still hesitated.
‘And we’ll take Professor Penrose with us as Matthew’s tutor, and on rainy days, the three of them can work on Markham’s PA.’
Matthew and Professor Penrose were building Markham his own personal assistant. Don’t ask. Just don’t ask. There had been one incident already. In the tea-sodden aftermath someone had jokingly referred to it as R2-Tea2 and the name had stuck. Despite this tiny setback, the professor’s and Matthew’s enthusiasm continued unabated. Only the other day I’d come across them trying to teach it simple tasks.
The lesson had gone thusly:
‘R2-Tea2. What is the weather today?’
‘On the third stroke, it will be 12:43 precisely.’
The clock said a quarter to four.
So that was going well, then.
‘Hmm,’ I said, dragging my mind back to the enticing thought of Adrian- and Mikey-free days. ‘Theoretically, the thought of shunting ninety per cent of our troublemakers out of the building and into your area of responsibility is very tempting. It’s just . . .’
‘I know,’ he said again. ‘But I think you might have your hands full here and, from a parental point of view, it’s not good for a son to see his mother thumping the new Head of Security.’
Indignantly, I drew myself up, considered his words and then let myself sag again, and that can’t have been a pretty sight.
‘I understand why.’ I sighed. ‘I just don’t like it.’
Leon took my hands. ‘It won’t be for very long. I don’t think things will go horribly wrong here, but if they do, you might be glad Matthew’s out of the firing line.’
I nodded. He was right. He often is. No need to tell him that.
‘And when we’re all jumping from place to place, Adrian and Mikey can pretend they’re still on the run from the Time Police. For them, it will be like the good old days again.’
Further down Hawking someone shouted Leon’s name. He looked over my shoulder. ‘Yes, I’m coming.’
‘I’ll let you get on.’
‘Try not to worry, Max.’
I nodded and left him and was just crossing the Hall when Peterson called down to me. It struck me he was looking nervous.
‘What’s up?’ I said, climbing the stairs. ‘Murdered Hyssop and buried her body in the Sunken Garden?’
‘That’s Option B,’ he said. ‘Are you busy?’
‘Oh God, yes,’ I said, suspecting he wanted me to do something ghastly. ‘Tremendously busy, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you want to come to church with me?’
And I was right.
I tried not to sound too horrified. ‘Church?’
‘Yes, the big building at the top of the village with the pointy roof and the dead people in the garden.’
I stepped back. ‘Oh my God – you have killed her, haven’t you? You’ve killed Hyssop. That didn’t take long. Although I never thought it would be you. Well – the important thing is not to panic. You must distract people . . . somehow . . . and I’ll get the body out. I wish Markham were here – this is just the sort of thing he’s good at. Although if he were here then she wouldn’t be and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The key thing is not to go off half-cocked but to keep our heads. Go and wipe your fingerprints off everything you’ve touched today and then go and talk to Mrs Partridge. About something or other. She can be your alibi. Where have you left her? Hyssop, I mean. It’s vital that we . . .’
I trailed off as Hyssop emerged from the Library and turned off towards the Security Section.
I clutched his arm. ‘Oh my God, Tim – you’ve killed the wrong woman.’
He was leaning against the wall with his arms folded. ‘When you’ve quite finished . . . For your information I haven’t killed anyone.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s disappointing. What do you want me for, then?’
‘I want you to come with me while I talk to the vicar.’
I said cautiously, ‘About . . . ?’
‘Getting married. To Lingoss,’ he added, bringing me completely up to speed.
I was quite indignant. ‘You’re getting married in a church?’
‘People do, you know. It used to be quite traditional.’
‘What’s the matter with our chapel?’
‘Well, the thing is, Max – our chapel here isn’t big enough. Felix has a family. And I know how hard this is for you to understand, but some of us do have friends outside St Mary’s. So it’s the church for us. And Markham’s not here so I thought you might like to come and provide moral support.’
Well, anything’s better than working, I suppose.
I shot off to change and we ambled out of the front door and down the drive. It was a lovely sunny day. In the distance I could hear the chug-chug of giant machinery, and the rich smell of hay hung heavy in the air. And back I went again. Six hundred and fifty years into the past.
I hadn’t said anything to anyone – not even to Dr Stone in our weekly half-hour session on Friday afternoons – but occasionally I still saw St Mary’s as it was six hundred and fifty years ago. Just as it had been when I was stranded there in 1399. Occasionally, when I wasn’t concentrating – which, let’s face it, was pretty much all the time – I still tried to walk through doors that weren’t there any longer. Or, more painfully, walked into walls that hadn’t been there in 1399. The fact that they were here now – solid, recognisable and pai
nful – in no way mitigated the regularity of these occurrences. Sometimes I’d look up and a faint door would just be closing and I’d swear Fat Piers was on his way to the pantry. Or Margery off to do the laundry. Or a dim chicken – I mean dim as in faint, not dim as in stupid. Trust me, chickens in 1399 could have brought down society if they’d put their minds to it. I don’t know why Henry V bothered with archers when he could have just taken a contingent of chickens to Agincourt. Resistance would have crumbled and he’d have been king of France by the end of the week. Where was I? Yes, talking about my occasional problems with seeing things at St Mary’s as they were in 1399 and not things as they were now.
Either I was going mad – not as impossible as you might think – or, and the thought wouldn’t leave me – it was the result of too much timeline activity. Our normal assignments can last for anything from a single afternoon to about six months, but I’d been at the medieval St Mary’s nearly a year. I’d lived as one of them. I’d helped with the harvests, collected firewood, fed the chickens, dug ditches and spread the washing over bushes. I’d become part of their lives. They’d imprinted on me. I wondered if I’d imprinted on them. As a ghost, perhaps. And, as I saw their faint outlines, did they see me? Did they walk around saying, ‘Do you remember that funny foreign woman? The one who set fire to everything? I could have sworn I saw her over by the stables just now.’ Did they believe I was some sort of hero whose ghost would return in times of crisis to save them? Like Theseus? Or Arthur? Or was I just the weirdo who kept starting fires? Well, I think we all know the answer to that one.
The thing is – and it’s a big thing – I’d made more jumps than anyone I knew, and I couldn’t help wondering if these flashbacks were some sort of side effect of too much time travel. Do we actually leave a little bit of ourselves behind in each time we jump to? Was I slowly diminishing? Fading away? I looked down at myself. No, I still looked fairly substantial. Perhaps it was pieces of my mind I was leaving behind. Or would it be more accurate to say pieces of my heart? In which case, there was a very large lump of it still in 1399. Should I say anything to Dr Stone? Suppose there was a limit to the number of times a person could safely jump up and down the timeline and I’d exceeded it and they made me stop?
‘Nice day,’ said Peterson, and my mind cleared and I was just me again, strolling down the road with him on our way to convince the Church of England he was a responsible member of the parish – which was perfectly true as long as nobody enquired exactly what he was responsible for.
We wandered down the hill, Peterson chuntering on about something or other, and me inhaling deeply and forcing my sinuses to earn their keep just for once. We crossed the little stone bridge over the stream which marked the village boundary. Peterson stopped to peer down into the dark water beneath. I did as I always did and looked upstream. Because every now and then, my treacherous dreams take me back to a still and sunny glade beside a pool running with clear, cold water, where a man watched me weave a daisy chain.
In what I told myself was an effort to exorcise these too real imaginings, I did once try to follow this stream, to find the place where I’d sat with William Hendred, but I’d underestimated the alterations to the landscape over six centuries. Not only could I not find the little pool again, but the course of the stream had changed as well. I tramped up and down for ages but it had all gone – the little glade, the pool, the flowers, the dragonflies. I don’t know why I searched. Was I once more hoping to see a man smiling at me from the other bank? Or was it truly a tiny moment in time and space that was gone forever?
‘You all right?’ said Peterson.
I came back. ‘Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’
He looked at me for a while and then said, ‘No idea. Come on. We don’t want to upset the church, do we?’
Personally I couldn’t see any reason at all for not upsetting the church – which never seems to care if it upsets me – but given that on this occasion I was Peterson’s wingman – poor deluded fool – it was probably best not to incur religious wrath until after he and Lingoss had safely tied the knot.
The village was its usual hive of inactivity. Everyone was at work in Rushford. These days, of course, no one works in the fields all day. Or if they do then it’s in a super-luxurious, GPS-guided, fully automated tea-and-biscuit-dispensing harvester sophisticated enough to fly to the moon should it choose to do so.
It was uphill to the church. The road slopes down from St Mary’s to the bridge then up again to the church as it watches over the rest of the village.
They’d made some changes since 1399. There was a lychgate – the traditional resting place for the coffin to pause, out of the rain. The yews had gone, of course – even yews don’t last that long and at some point the churchyard had been enclosed by a dry-stone wall. On the other side was grazing land, just as it had been nearly six and a half centuries ago, scattered with horse chestnuts. Sheep clustered under the spreading branches, enjoying the shade on this hot afternoon, just as their ancestors had so often done.
Three or four of them grazed in the churchyard – sheep, I mean, not ancestors – keeping the grass down. When I was little, I used to think sheep were eating the dead bodies. Makes you wonder how I grew up to be so normal, doesn’t it?
We pushed open the gate and walked up the path to be greeted by a short wiry individual in running gear who leaped out from behind a weeping angel.
‘Hello there. You must be . . .’ he consulted something written on the back of his hand, ‘Timothy Peterson.’
Peterson nodded.
‘Kevin Aguta.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’re the . . .’ and stopped just in time.
He grinned. ‘The Rev Kev at your service. I think it’s got quite a ring to it, don’t you? And you are . . . ?’
‘Max,’ I said, shaking the vicar’s outstretched hand.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said, looking as if it actually was, which given that he served on the Parish Council and frequently encountered St Mary’s in our embarrassing post-catastrophe moments, was very good of him. ‘Do come in.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d like to take a moment to look around the gravestones. Professional interest,’ and then panicked in case he thought I was Rushford’s answer to Burke and Hare and hastily added, ‘Historical interest.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s lovely to welcome our friends from St Mary’s.’
I couldn’t help but be impressed at this truly Christian display of tolerance and forgiveness. Very few people publicly claim us as friends.
‘Besides,’ said Peterson, ‘we’re all pretty sure she’ll burst into flames the moment she crosses the threshold.’
The Rev Kev’s face lit up. He turned to me. ‘Are you sure you won’t come in? I’ve never actually seen that happen, you know. Life in a rural parish is very quiet. Even when that parish does contain St Mary’s.’
I grinned and they disappeared off to wherever vicars usher their prospective victims and I looked around the lumpy churchyard. For reader reassurance, I think we can assume the lumps were only old unmarked graves whose occupants slumbered serenely in the sunshine, rather than hastily disposed-of corpses, improperly buried. It occurred to me that if St Mary’s ever did have to dispose of Hyssop then this would be an ideal place. They’d never notice an additional hump.
Dr Dowson had said burials from the medieval era were probably congregated in the south-east corner of the churchyard, although no one could be absolutely sure. I stood in the porch and looked around. If the church was oriented in the usual way – east to west – then the south-east corner was over there.
I walked slowly between the graves, hoping the dates would give me some sort of clue. You’d think the earliest dates would be nearest the church, wouldn’t you, and then spread outwards in a neat radius, but no. There were graves all over the place. No rhyme or reaso
n to their placement. The same names seemed to occur regularly – local families obviously. There were no Hendreds anywhere. I knew the line hadn’t died out – their descendants, the Hendys, still lived over at Castle Hendred on the other side of Whittington – but it looked as if William Hendred’s particular line had died with him.
I knew he wasn’t buried at St Mary’s and I was almost certain he hadn’t been returned to the Hendred clan, which just left this churchyard as his probable final resting place. But if he was here then his grave was unmarked. There had probably been a simple wooden cross but that would have disappeared a long time ago. Was his shade watching me now as I wandered among the haphazard rows of the dead on this hot June day? Did he remember?
A terrible wave of homesickness welled up out of nowhere. It wasn’t that I was unhappy with Leon and Matthew – far from it. Oh, I don’t know . . . I think if William had gone on to live a long and happy life then I’d feel . . . not happier . . . more reconciled, perhaps. And I’d been happy then and now it was all gone. Had been gone for a very long time. Time is inexorable. The centuries piled up behind me like a cliff-face. I floated in time, rootless and unanchored. Not knowing my place. Here and now? Or there and then?
And time is cruel. It had rolled across the landscape, bringing enough change to make me a stranger in my own time while leaving just enough faint and familiar outlines to pull at my heart. The church was virtually unchanged. The line of the original village street was still there. Even some of the houses were in exactly the same position. Yes, the ford had gone, but the same stream still flowed. And through the trees, I could catch a glimpse of St Mary’s. Larger and more modern but still occupying the same place in the landscape. Somewhere over there were stones and maybe a few timbers that had known William Hendred and Joan of Rouen.
‘Joan of York,’ said Walter in my head. Walter of Shrewsbury had been the steward at St Mary’s. It had not been a happy relationship for either of us. Joan of Rouen, I’d called myself then.
But I never got to be Joan of St Mary’s.