by Jodi Taylor
‘But if you buried . . . say, the Sword of Charlemagne in this country, to be discovered here, then that wouldn’t arise.’
‘Possibly – although I think it would probably lead to yet another European war – but discovery in an improbable location would considerably increase the chances of it being denounced as a forgery or fake. That would only have to happen once and everything we subsequently discovered would be suspect.’
‘Hmm,’ he said, which is what I say when I’m not convinced by someone’s argument but too polite to say so. He might have taken it further, but I’d subtly chivvied him up the stairs, intending to return him safely to his own office where Mrs Partridge could keep him safely corralled for the rest of the day. But somehow he veered off and suddenly we were outside R&D. Where things did not get any better.
I made very sure to knock loudly. I don’t normally do that. No one does. We barge in and take our chances and if, for some reason, no one is wearing their trousers that day we simply close our eyes and move on. And yes, that has happened. Last Tuesday, actually – the same day Bashford had been banned from the kitchen for getting a stick blender entangled in his hair. That had been quite an exciting day.
And today was living down to normal R&D standards as well.
Bashford lay on the floor with his arms crossed neatly on his chest. I’m ashamed to say my first thought was one of utter panic.
Oh God, not a dead body. Not on Treadwell’s first day. We hadn’t even had lunch yet.
And then, thank heavens, Bashford opened his eyes. ‘Oh, hello, Max.’
‘Good morning,’ I said formally, maintaining Markham’s standards. From that moment, the conversation proceeded along a well-worn path.
Me – knowing I’ll regret it but impelled by my lemming genes towards the Cliff of Catastrophe: What exactly is going on here, professor?
Prof R – standing over Bashford: This is so exciting.
Me – not panicking yet but not far off: Oh yes? What’s that, then?
Prof R – vibrating with excitement: Levitation.
Me – hoping against hope I’ve misheard somehow: Leviticus?
Prof R – making appropriate gestures: No. Lev-it-ation.
Me – still not completely without hope: Are you sure? Only I thought you said Leviticus. You know – the Bible.
Prof R – beaming: No, I said levitation. You know – the action of causing an object to rise into the air by means of willpower.
Me – battling the familiar, cold premonition of disaster and failing: I’m sorry – levitation?
Prof R – concerned: Yes, didn’t you do it at school?
Me – still not quite believing this conversation is taking place: No, we did geography.
Prof R – shaking his head at such ignorance: No, Max. That thing where you lift someone up with two fingers. Because they’re weightless.
Me – to self: Oh God . . .
Normally, at this point, I could expect things to go one of two ways: either Bashford would improbably waft past at head height, or St Mary’s would engage the Second Law of Thermodynamics and begin the inevitable transition from order to chaos. Place your bets now, ladies and gentlemen – this could go either way.
Sadly – or probably not – it wasn’t going any way at all today. Not with present company standing at my side.
‘A fascinating experiment, professor,’ I said with the smoothness of long practice, ‘and one with so many practical applications. Please don’t let us detain you,’ and nudged Treadwell towards the door before the professor took it into his head to use our new Director as an experimental subject and floated him out of an upstairs window. Although now I came to think of it . . .
And then a minor miracle occurred. I don’t mean Bashford spontaneously overcame the force of gravity, but Commander Treadwell leaned forwards with an expression of great interest and said, ‘I assume this is related to the Casimir Effect – nanoscale levitation, zero friction and so forth.’
The professor beamed. ‘Yes, to some extent. I’m looking at practical applications. If we could just overcome the problem of unwanted attraction in . . . oh, I wonder . . .’ He petered out and wandered off, apparently overcome by the excitement of it all.
‘Interesting,’ was all Treadwell said, itself an interesting reaction.
I nudged him out of the door before more specific enquiries dispelled the good impression.
‘So,’ he said as we strolled around the gallery. ‘Tell me about your favourite . . . jumps.’
‘Mine?’
‘Yes.’
Of course, that’s like when someone asks you which is your favourite book. Your mind goes blank and you can’t remember a single thing you’ve read in the last twenty years. It would have been nice to have reeled off a wide-ranging list of jumps demonstrating the depth and variety of St Mary’s talents – the Cretaceous, Troy, Agincourt, the Gates of Grief, to name but a few – but for some reason the only one I could remember was Joan of Arc.
‘Um . . . well . . . one that stays in my mind is the jump to Rouen in 1431. To watch Joan of Arc’s execution.’
‘Why?’
‘As part of a training exercise.’
‘Why?’
Somehow we were back down the stairs again.
‘This is oversimplifying things slightly, but a large part of our job is watching people die. At some point, as trainees, we’re all faced with the unpleasant-death assignment. To see how we handle it. Because some don’t.’
‘And Joan of Arc died . . . ?’
‘Slowly and painfully.’
‘That must have been unpleasant for you.’
‘Unpleasant for everyone. But mostly Joan, of course.’
‘And yet it was the English who burned her.’
‘A common misconception. She was burned by the French church for heresy. The English merely sold her to them with instructions to get on with it.’
By now, we’d passed through the front doors and were strolling around the side of the building. It was a nice morning. Sunny . . . peaceful . . . although God knew for how much longer.
‘Why was it necessary for you to be there?’
‘As I said, a training assignment. I was Chief Training Officer at the time.’ Actually, that sounds grander than it was. I was the only training officer at the time.
‘No – I mean, as a woman. Must have been upsetting. Does that happen often?’
‘Does what happen often?’
‘Women on assignments.’
I blinked. ‘All the time.’
‘Why?’
‘For most of History, the sexes had rigidly defined roles and positions. There are places men can go and women can’t and places women can go and men can’t.’
‘Yes, I accept that as an argument for studying domestic and social issues, but surely you’re very much at risk during battles and violent disturbances.’
‘Remind me to introduce you to Miss Sykes. She’s very sound on the world and its position in the lives of women.’
This wasn’t actually the first time someone had tried the ‘women should stay safely at home’ thing. The idiot Halcombe had made a similar mistake a little while ago. Bashford, entering into the spirit of the thing, had described all women as mere vessels, and Sykes had agreed immediately, declaring herself to be a seventeen-thousand-ton battleship, dreadnought class, with enough firepower to level a city. No one had argued on that occasion and I was willing to bet no one would if she did it again.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I and trying, politely, to stop you making an arse of yourself. You must be aware of the identities of Mrs Mack, Mrs Enderby and Mrs Shaw.’
‘Obviously I’ve read the files, but it just illustrates my arguments, doesn’t it? One’s head of cooking, one’s head of needle
work and one’s a secretary.’
The more discerning among you will have noticed that I’m not as young as I used to be. Marriage and motherhood have taken the spring out of my step. Once upon a time a red mist would have descended and there would have been actions that everyone but me would have regretted, but now I’m older and more mature and it’s less a red mist and more a kind of lavender haze. Like poison gas but prettier.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘you’re one of those. Kinder, Kȕche, Kirche.’
‘No,’ he said patiently, apparently getting the reference. ‘I’m speaking as an employer, one of whose duties is to keep his employees safe. Can you give me a reason why you, personally, should be at Waterloo, or Hastings?’
‘I’m an historian,’ I said patiently in return. ‘It’s my job. And I was at both.’
‘Hmm,’ he said again.
‘I doubt,’ I said, ‘that your advocacy of children, kitchen and church will find much support at St Mary’s. For example, there are any number of educated women here, all with enquiring minds, so the church’s only interest in us would be as kindling.’
This was true. I’d asked questions at school. As you’re supposed to, I believe. But – and I don’t know if anyone’s ever noticed – only certain questions are acceptable.
My teacher had batted aside questions about Virgin Births with practised ease. She’d been slightly stumped when I’d enquired about Jezebel, wife of Ahab, and why the dogs hadn’t eaten her skull, her feet and the palms of her hands, but it was my criticism of a belief system that encouraged Abraham to offer up his son for sacrifice, solely to curry favour with a god, that had propelled me straight into detention for a week, where I’d very ostentatiously read The God Delusion and not understood a word of it.
And I don’t cook because there are quicker and easier ways of setting fire to a building than by trying to stir something in a saucepan. And I’m abysmally bad with children. Although, to be fair, it’s not all my fault because they’re equally bad with me.
However, since I was supposed to be older and wiser, I let the Treadwell idiot live, enquiring whether he himself had ever considered a career in the church.
To my surprise, he laughed. ‘I’m fully aware of the point you’re making, doctor, but can you honestly assure me a battlefield is a safe place for a woman?’
‘I think you might be a trifle hazy on the definition of battlefield. I don’t think they’re meant to be safe. For anyone.’
‘But particularly unsafe for women.’
‘Look,’ I said, old memories of the time I’d worked with the Time Police bubbling to the surface like marsh gas. ‘I’m an historian who happens to be female. Peterson’s an historian who happens to be male. There’s no difference between a male historian and a female historian. Well, only a very little one. In fact, if I can resurrect an old Time Police joke I once heard . . .’
‘What are the Time Police?’
I stared at him, my mouth open. ‘You haven’t been briefed on the Time Police?’
‘Apparently not, but please feel free to make any jokes that may occur to you.’
I looked around for some privacy. The Sunken Garden was just over there. ‘Come with me.’
‘Are you going to drown me?’
‘Only in facts.’
‘I don’t think that’s necessary.’
‘Then I’ll leave you in ignorance. Do you think your employers have done it deliberately?’
‘Done what?’
‘Sent you here incompletely briefed. Are you their fall guy, all ready and waiting for the day everything goes tits up?’
‘Dr Maxwell, everyone wants to make a success of this – a bright, shiny new St Mary’s – a flagship government initiative bringing in prestige and profit.’
Oh God, we were doomed. I said, ‘All right – I won’t tell you.’
‘Tell me what? What sort of stories are you going to attempt to frighten me with?’
I stepped back and smiled. ‘None at all. I can see you’re much too clever to place an overreliance on actual facts. And as they say, ignorance is bliss. But remember, everyone here knows about the Time Police. Your employers know about the Time Police. The only person who doesn’t know about the Time Police is you.’
Well – that could have gone better. It occurred to me I should go and talk reassuringly to my department, but there were too many of us for my office so I shunted us all into Wardrobe. Mrs Enderby shut the door and we all looked at each other.
‘Sit down, guys,’ I said and they did.
I have a large and vociferous department. I’ve never known them so quiet.
Eventually, Dr Dowson said, ‘Max . . .’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t add anything to Commander Treadwell’s briefing. You now know everything I know.’
‘What’s going to happen now?’ asked Rosie Lee.
‘Again, I don’t know. I’ve exchanged a few words with him and he’s assured me he’s not going to rush into any major changes immediately but I think we’d be deceiving ourselves if we thought everything’s going to remain the same. I do beg of you to approach this with open minds. Change is not necessarily bad. Ask yourselves – if it was Dr Bairstow proposing this new method of working, would we oppose it? Try to see improvement where it actually does exist.’
Atherton nodded gloomily. ‘They did this at the bank I worked at. We all had to go on a course where bright, sparkly people with frightening smiles exhorted us to embrace change because those who can’t die out. I think they cited the dinosaurs.’
‘So they weren’t killed by an asteroid at all, then?’ said Bashford, astonished.
‘Not according to the expensive people hired to tell us that our expertise, the working relationships we’d built up over the years, all our hard work was now utterly valueless – as would we be if we didn’t get with the new programme. According to them, it was their inability to adapt to this month’s new ideas and working practices that did for the dinosaurs and the asteroid had nothing to do with it. They were quite horrified at our lack of enthusiasm for massive redundancies while senior managers – reluctantly, of course – accepted promotions and pay rises with increased bonuses.’
Van Owen twisted in her seat. ‘I’m guessing you weren’t with this bank for very long.’
‘No one was,’ he said, gloomily.
I glanced towards the doors. They were solid and they were closed.
‘I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we’ve been through this before with the idiot Halcombe. So just as before – simple precautions, people. Grab bags ready. Shred anything you don’t want held against you in the future. The Archive’s already safe with Leon in TB2. Be ready to go at a moment’s notice.’
‘Aren’t we overreacting?’ enquired Mrs Enderby.
‘Very possibly,’ I said. ‘In fact, I hope so. Then when everything turns out all right, we can sheepishly unpack our stuff and carry on as if nothing has happened.’
I took a breath. There are a lot of civilians in my department.
‘Those who wish to leave St Mary’s in a more conventional manner may do so. No one will hold anything against you. And you should be aware – if we do have to evacuate, we might not be back any time soon. And – again I’m sorry – but if we do return, it might not be here to St Mary’s. We might be in another location. Another country, even. If anyone wants to come and talk with me about this, then Rosie will find you a slot. But – let’s not panic yet. Let’s wait to see what Commander Treadwell has in store for us first.’
The next disaster wasn’t, in fact, Treadwell-related. Well, only very slightly.
They say bad things happen in threes. Personally, I’ve always found they happen in multiples of threes. Something goes wrong, which causes something else to go wrong, things begin to spiral out of control, disasters accumulate and the
n everything drops off a cliff. Which is OK because, as Hyssop had said, falling off the cliff is fine – it’s the landing that kills you. The trick is never to stop falling.
Anyway – we’d acquired Hyssop. We’d acquired Treadwell. And then, just when you’d think things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
I was in R&D. I can’t remember why, because suddenly finding myself confronted with an entire room full of prototype Baghdad Batteries had inexplicably caused more mundane matters to fly right out of my head.
Apparently, Professor Rapson had touched down on Planet Earth long enough to absorb some of Treadwell’s cost-cutting idiocy and had hatched some crazy idea about powering St Mary’s with a complicated network of copper rods and lemon juice. Most of his section had enthusiastically embraced this God-given opportunity to undermine the English Electricity Board, its sprawling empire, and possibly all of civilisation, as well.
‘Lemon juice,’ the professor was saying, from his position beneath a fingerprint-covered sign saying DO NOT TOUCH. ‘Or perhaps vinegar, but lemon juice has more possibilities, I think. And we could grow our own. Lemons, that is. We’d need extensive hothouses, of course, but they probably wouldn’t be as expensive as people say and we’d recoup the cost in a hundred years or so – and think of it, Max – a safe and renewable energy source and if we could patent it . . . well. I’m sure I’ll be able to get our new Director interested.’
I opened my mouth and Mrs Partridge spoke in my ear.
‘Dr Maxwell, Commander Treadwell would like to speak with you.’
‘Sorry, professor, Treadwell wants me.’
The professor’s face lit up. ‘Do you think he’s heard what we’re doing already?’
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’
‘Can I rely on you to . . .’
‘Put a good word in? Of course,’ I said, confident that Treadwell would be even less enthusiastic than I was.
As I left, they were discussing the benefits of urine over lemon juice.