Kaz nodded once, swallowed hard and told himself that she was right, he was being silly, her plan was sensible and logical. That didn’t entirely quell the potent mix of mortification and uncomfortable excitement he was feeling at finding himself alone with a half-naked girl, but it did at least allow him to muster the self-control necessary to look up and walk across to Jana, who was standing with her hands on her hips.
‘Do you not feel even a little bit embarrassed standing there like that?’ he asked as he held up the linen strip and handed it to Jana.
‘Not even the littlest bit,’ she confirmed as she pulled the linen across her chest and held out either end.
Kaz walked behind her, took hold of the ends of the linen and pulled it tight. He absolutely refused to pay attention to the soft warmth of her skin as his fingers brushed against it.
‘Nudity taboo’s stupid. The body is just biology,’ she said. ‘Nothing special. The only reason you’re in such a fluster is because you’re eighteen and basically suffering from hormone poisoning. It’s not your fault, you’ll grow out of it.’
Kaz pulled the linen even tighter and began to knot it against the curve of her spine. ‘Hey, you’re actually younger than me,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but I’m a girl,’ she said, as if stating the most transparently obvious of all possible facts. ‘We’re just, y’know, better.’
He gave a final, slightly vindictive tug, and finished the knot, then he stepped back. ‘Done,’ he said.
Jana stepped forward, grabbed one of Dora’s father’s discarded shirts, pulled it over her head and turned back to Kaz, arms out wide. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Will I pass?’
Forced to consider her appearance seriously for the first time, Kaz was alarmed to notice that he found her very attractive indeed. In a defiant, bossy, American kind of way.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Your face is very … girly. You just look like a girl with very small breasts. Sorry.’
Jana sighed. ‘It’ll have to do. You’ve got to remember that this is a different time. People here are very set in their gender roles, there’s not a whole lot of androgyny in seventeenth-century rural Cornwall. The people we meet are far more likely to think that I’m a very effeminate boy. I’ll have to lower my voice slightly, though,’ she said, doing exactly that. ‘Now your turn. You’ve got to ditch the modern clothes, you’ll stand out like a sore thumb.’
Jana was already pulling down her trousers, so Kaz was grateful for the distraction as he collected together all the garments he could find. Dora’s father was a total slob, and the few items of clothing he had were scattered randomly across the floor.
He found another shirt, one pair of leather trousers and a kind of smock thing made of rough cloth. He held the trousers up to his legs and then threw them to Jana.
‘Too small,’ he explained. ‘I’ll stick with jeans.’
Jana considered him as she pulled the trousers on. ‘Lucky they’re black, not blue,’ she said. ‘Rub some mud over them when we get outside, it should do unless we get a close inspection.’
Kaz held the shirt up and recoiled as he was hit in the face by a potent whiff of old sweat. ‘Wow, stinky,’ he said, pulling a face.
‘Mine too,’ said Jana. ‘No showers here. No soap either. Just the manly musk of unwashed baker.’
Kaz pulled off his jacket and jumper, but left his thermal top on; it was white and would be hidden by the shirt, which he pulled over his head and left untucked at the waist to help disguise his jeans.
‘This thing is too small,’ he said, throwing a jerkin to Jana. ‘Dora’s dad is tiny.’
‘So is Dora,’ replied Jana as she tried the jerkin on. ‘People are smaller in this time. Actually, I hadn’t thought of that. You’re going to look like a giant.’
Kaz felt stupid in his jeans and smelly shirt, but then he realised there was another problem. ‘Shoes,’ he said. He scoured the room again, but found no footwear at all.
‘He probably only has one pair, and he’ll be wearing those,’ said Jana. ‘I think I’ll be OK. My leather boots will probably pass, once I get them nice and muddy. But yours …’
Kaz looked down at his bright blue Gore-Tex walking boots and shook his head. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘These were a present from my dad.’
‘We are so doomed,’ said Jana, shaking her head but still seeming to Kaz as if she was more amused than scared.
Kaz laughed at the ridiculousness of their situation. He knew that he and Jana were acting recklessly, dressing up and playing at undercover spies, but he didn’t really care. ‘Are you enjoying this as much as I am?’ he asked.
‘Are you kidding me?’ she replied. ‘I woke up this morning and the most exciting thing I could think of to do was give my bodyguards the slip and play hooky from school. Now I’m hundreds of years in the past, disguising myself so I can go mingle with soldiers and peasants as I make my way to a fortified manor house in search of a woman from the future who wants to kill me. Call me insane, but it sure beats hanging out at the mall.’
She and Kaz smiled at each other, a moment of shared excitement that was broken when Kaz heard the distant rumble of hooves. He could see that Jana heard it too.
‘Come on,’ she said, heading for the stairs.
‘Wait,’ he replied. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to jump back to the future and I don’t want to be walking around looking and smelling like a seventeenth-century peasant.’ He began bundling up their discarded clothes and shoving them into the backpack as Jana impatiently tapped her foot and peered out of a dusty window, trying to see what was going on outside.
‘We can’t carry that around with us, you know,’ she said, over her shoulder.
‘We can bury it in the woods, collect it later. Shall we put the guns in it?’
Jana pulled a face that told him exactly what she thought of that idea.
‘OK, we keep the guns.’
‘I can’t see much, but I think there are soldiers on a patch of grass outside,’ said Jana as Kaz joined her at the window.
‘Village green, I think,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ asked Jana.
‘Oh, something you don’t know.’
She scowled at his sarcasm, so he explained. ‘A patch of common land at the centre of the village, used for keeping animals and playing cricket. England still has them in my time.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied frostily. ‘Come on, let’s go take a look.’
They hurried downstairs. While Jana cracked the front door open to get a better look at the new arrivals, Kaz nipped out the back door and found a pile of leaves in which to hide the backpack. Having stashed it safely, he joined her at the front door.
‘Roundhead troops,’ she said, with the brisk functionality of a TV voice-over. ‘Forces loyal to Parliament. They’re often Puritans, fundamentalist Protestants. They’ll defile churches that display anything they think smacks of Catholicism, and be that bit harder on the population of a village or town that tolerates such a church.’
Something about the calm, dispassionate way Jana imparted this information gave Kaz a chill. She was regurgitating it from a chip in her head, not speaking from her own learning or experience. He thought it made her seem slightly robotic, a million miles away from the cocksure, amused girl who had teased him only minutes before. She was a mass of contradictions. One moment funny and excited, the next cold and inhuman. He found himself wondering how much of her warm, approachable self had been an act, carefully calculated to make him like her.
The sound of smashing glass snapped Kaz’s attention back to the soldiers.
‘That’ll be the church windows. Stained glass, at a guess,’ said Jana.
‘Forget that,’ said Kaz. ‘What about Dora? The village is deserted. What will they do if they find her?’
‘Nothing good,’ muttered Jana. ‘You’re right, we have to try and find her before they do.’
‘They’re coming
,’ Kaz observed, pointing to a group of three soldiers who were walking towards the collection of houses that included the bakery. ‘They’ll go house to house.’
Jana shut the door and turned. ‘Out the back,’ she said.
They slipped out the back door and began to work their way around the perimeter of the village, checking houses as they went, staying ahead of the Roundhead soldiers, hoping against hope that Dora hadn’t done the obvious thing and run straight for the church.
Dora came running from the opposite direction and re-entered the bakery mere seconds after Jana and Kaz moved out of sight.
13
Dora balled her fists, ready to fight back if the soldier tried to force himself upon her, as she expected he would.
She forced defiant words through her tightly clenched teeth. ‘I warn you, I will not submit easily.’
The soldier stood there, seemingly as surprised as Dora. Then he took a single step forward, crossing the threshold of the bakery, his features sharpening as he emerged from the sunlight.
‘I would expect no less of you, Dora,’ he said, his voice deep and rich.
He stood there, examining her face and clothes, puzzled but stern. For her part, Dora stared hard at his face, trying to make sense of its odd familiarity. There was a strong chin hidden underneath the straggly beard of early manhood; the grime accumulated from a long military campaign caked high cheekbones and framed piercing green eyes. In a flash, she recognised him.
‘James?’ she said, amazed.
The soldier nodded, and Dora ran forward and flung her arms around her long-lost brother.
It took her a moment to realise that he was not hugging her back. She awkwardly relinquished her grip and stood back to regard him more closely. ‘You have changed so much,’ she said as she examined his face, his height, the broad expanse of his chest and his thick arms. ‘You are a man now. And a soldier.’ She smiled, teasingly, even though she instinctively knew he would not respond with the easy smiles of his younger self, the boy she remembered from long childhood days spent playing in the fields and forests.
‘I am,’ he said. ‘You also have changed, sister. Though not as much as I would have expected.’ There was a note of suspicion in his voice that made Dora uneasy.
Dora took a step backwards. She had been so overwhelmed with surprise and joy at seeing James that she had forgotten her strange clothes and inexplicable youth. But James had last seen her when she twelve years old, and while the changes that two years’ growth had wrought were slight enough to give him pause, she was still older than when he had last seen her. She hoped that would be enough to quell his doubts.
‘I know,’ replied Dora with a nervous smile and a kind of apologetic shrug. ‘I was grievous ill three years ago. It is only through the grace of God that I survived, but it withered me and I have not grown as I ought.’ It was a desperate lie, but James nodded, seeming to accept her story.
‘I am saddened to hear it, Dora. You are well now?’
Dora did not think he sounded especially sad, and the cold calm of his response served only to increase her nervousness.
‘I am.’
James surveyed the bakery. ‘It is smaller than I remember.’ There was no fond nostalgia here. His tone of voice conveyed both surprise and contempt. He returned his gaze to Dora. ‘Where are our parents?’
‘I … I do not know,’ she stammered. ‘I have returned from Sweetclover Hall this past hour. I am as vexed by the village’s desertion as you.’
James reached forward and grabbed her arm roughly. ‘The hall? You’ve been at the hall?’
The urgency in his voice told Dora that she had made a mistake. She had thought her lie a good one, but the force of his grip told her otherwise.
‘James, you’re hurting me.’ She wriggled but he did not relinquish his hold on her.
‘These garments you wear, are these new fashions brought in from Spain?’ Now his voice was colder still, full of hatred and fury. ‘Do the Royalists at the hall consort with popish agents? Is that what my home has been brought to?’
His grip was very tight now, and Dora squealed in pain as she struggled to free herself. ‘James! Let me go!’ she cried.
James turned and dragged Dora out of the door and into the street, even as she writhed and kicked.
‘Any sign?’ he called as he emerged.
‘No, sir’ and ‘All empty’ came the shouted replies of two other soldiers who were working their way down the street, checking the houses for occupation.
James stopped and turned again to Dora. ‘No more lies, sister,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’
‘James, I swear to you, I do not know,’ shouted Dora. ‘Now let me go.’
Her brother’s only response was a hard slap across the face that momentarily stunned her into silence. Her eyes watered and her ears rang as he dragged her towards the green. She stumbled along behind him, barely keeping her footing, trying to make sense of what was happening.
Throughout her ordeal in the future, Dora had longed to return to her own time. In Pendarn she knew the rules, knew her place, how things worked, what people expected of her, how to behave and how not to. But ever since she had crossed the time bridge back to her old home, she had found things even more confusing. The total strangeness of her experiences in the future was somehow less disorientating than the world turned upside down to which she had returned. The familiarity of the setting, and her knowledge of the people, made the uncharacteristic fear and cruelty far more upsetting than anything she had seen in the future.
She had escaped inexplicable danger and returned to her place of safety only to find that it was every bit as perilous as the future she had fled.
As her feet dragged and tripped across the thick, dew-wet grass of the green, Dora realised that her home had been taken from her. She was vaguely aware that this required a response from her, that she needed to decide how she was going to cope with a world now lacking in all certainty and kindness. But she needed time to gather her thoughts, and that was not to be allowed her.
‘Sir, there is but one inhabitant remaining in the village,’ she heard her brother say as he stopped abruptly, and she struggled to orient herself. ‘She is the baker’s daughter and claims she has lately returned from Sweetclover Hall to find the village deserted.’
Dora’s vision cleared as she found her balance. She was on the green, surrounded by soldiers. In front of her stood a tall man, his hard grey eyes reflecting the glint of sunlight from James’ metal breastplate. His bearing and position amongst the soldiers told Dora he was their commanding officer.
From the depths of her confusion and shock, Dora pulled a hard kernel of anger. ‘Baker’s daughter?’ she spat, outraged, into her brother’s face. ‘James Predennick, I do not know what has befallen you since you left home, but when our parents …’
She was not allowed to finish her diatribe, silenced by another ringing slap from her brother’s gloved hand. He released his grip on her arm as he struck, and she lost her footing, tumbling to the ground at his feet.
As her senses reeled again she heard the officer, muffled as if through a blanket, say, ‘The girl is your sister?’
‘In blood only, sir,’ replied James. ‘Her garments and her lies betray her popish corruption. I only give thanks that I departed this place before I, too, could be sullied.’
Looking up, Dora saw the ghost of a smile flit across the officer’s lips. ‘I do not think, Corporal Predennick, that the devil himself could have corrupted one as zealous as you.’ The hint of mockery seemed not to register with her brother.
Carefully, fearful of losing her balance and toppling over, Dora regained her footing. She resisted the urge to hold her cheek, which she could feel was already swelling from the blows, because she did not wish to seem weak. Ignoring her brother, she turned to the officer and curtsied as best she was able.
‘Sir,’ she said, trying to quell the tremble in her voice. ‘My brother, who has been a st
ranger to his brethren for many years, is mistaken.’
James raised his fist once again, but this time the officer raised his own hand and gestured for him to stand down. ‘What is your name, girl?’ he asked.
‘I am Theodora Predennick, sir,’ she replied, not quite able to prevent herself flashing a hateful glance at her brother as she did so.
‘Dora, in what respect is your brother in error? You must own, your garments are passing strange. What say you to his charges of popery and falsehood?’
Dora thought furiously and began to spin a yarn.
‘I no longer reside in Pendarn,’ she said. ‘I married a tailor from Lostwithiel two years ago and have resided there since. The clothes I wear represent his artful craft – he is a most creative cutter of cloth. Yesterday I rode to Sweetclover Hall to visit my mother, who works in the kitchens there. This morning I journeyed on to Pendarn to visit my father, who still resides herein. I found the village as you see it. This strange vacancy is as great a puzzle to me as to yourselves.’
The officer considered her curiously for a moment. ‘You have been to the hall?’ he asked.
Dora’s heart sank as she remembered that it was this admission which had triggered her brother’s ire only minutes earlier. Had her senses not been so scrambled by his beating she would have remembered. ‘Indeed, sir, I have.’
He stepped forward, his eyes fixed hard on hers, narrowed with intent. ‘And how found you the lord? Was he well?’
‘He is not one to mix with the likes of me, sir. I saw him not.’
‘We have been sent to ascertain the allegiance of this lord of yours. This very morning your brother brings me intelligence that suggests he is at the heart of a Royalist plot.’ The coldness of the officer’s voice scared Dora more than the violent fury of her brother.
TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Page 13