The Bone House (10 page)
“How do you do?” said Archie, extending a small hand.
“Hello, Archibald, you
have
grown a bit,” replied Vernon, bending to grasp the hand. He held it for a moment, then released it. “You should not have come,” he said, rising once more to address the mother.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s awkward. I can explain.”
“But I thought—that is, now that your father has passed—you said—”
“I know what I said,” he growled. “I said a lot of things. We all say things, you know, that . . . Well, never mind. What is to be done about it now?” Glancing down, he gave the boy a thin smile. “We must find a way to get you home again.”
“Vernon,” gasped Gemma, “what are you saying? We’ve left London for good. We’ve come here to be with you, to live with you.”
“I’m afraid that is not possible,” replied the lord stiffly. “Things have changed. My circumstances have changed. I think it would be best if you were to take a room at the hotel near the station, and I will come to you later and explain.”
“A hotel!” Gemma could not help shrieking the word. “What has happened? What has changed? You said we would be married. You promised.”
Lord Ashmole became stiffly officious. “Now, listen to me. Take a room. I will come to you later, and we’ll talk this over.” He turned and summoned Melton to attend him. “The lady and her son are leaving,” he informed the valet. “Send for a cab to take them to the hotel.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Don’t bother,” snapped Gemma Burley. “We’ll find our own way.”
She spun on her heel and marched to the door, almost yanking the little boy with her. Outside, she paused to gather her wits, and little Archie, bewildered and frightened about what had just taken place, began to cry. His mother picked him up and, holding him close for comfort and warmth, murmured to him, “There, now. It’s going to be all right. There has been some mistake, is all. I’m sure everything is going to be all right.”
She was still standing there when the door opened again. Vernon, in slippers, stepped out, his dressing gown billowing behind him as he ran. At first she imagined he had come to confess that it was all a dreadful misunderstanding, that he had repented of his folly and would now make it right. Then she saw the wallet in his hand.
“I simply cannot bear to see you leave like this,” he said. “Here, take this.” He shoved the leather pouch at her. “Please.”
“Vernon,” she said, her voice trembling, “why?”
“I can’t . . . I’m sorry, Gem,” he replied. “I meant to tell you. I tried . . .” He thrust the wallet into the crook of her arm where she held their whimpering child. “It is all I have at the moment. Take it.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“I can’t give you anything else. I’m sorry.” He took a step backwards, already distancing himself from them.
“But why, Vernon? You loved me once. We could have been happy. We can
still
be happy together.”
“It’s over, Gem. We come from such different worlds.” He spoke as if the words had been rehearsed until all meaning had leached from them. “My father was right. It would never have worked out between us. Surely you can see that.”
There was no reply she could make to that rejection. He turned and, without another word, stepped back inside and closed the door on them. Gemma, stunned, simply stood in the cold and gazed at the tightly shut door. As she turned to leave, she caught a reflection in the bay window overlooking the porch and realised she could see into the room—the morning room. Inside, seated at a table spread for breakfast, was a young lady she recognised. “Juliana!” she gasped, her empty stomach turning over.
As she watched, Vernon entered the room and, pausing to kiss his new bride, resumed his seat at the table. Gemma felt the earth shift beneath her feet as her world crumbled around her. Juliana, in a silk dressing gown, buttered her toast as if nothing had happened.
Gemma had seen enough. Struggling to keep her head high, she started down the long drive, placing one foot in front of the other as if it somehow mattered now that her life was over. Stunned and confused, her mind numb with shock, she paused at the great iron gates at the entrance and glanced back over her shoulder for one last glimpse of what might have been.
A little later, she came to herself once more. They were in the town and people were passing them in the street. “I’m hungry,” whined Archie, tugging on her sleeve. “Mummy, I’m hungry.”
“We’ll get something to eat now,” she said, gathering her thin coat around her. She looked at Vernon’s wallet in her hand and opened it. Inside were three ten-pound notes. “Thirty pieces of silver,” she said absently, staring at the money.
“Mum?”
She stirred herself then, taking the young boy’s hand. “Come along, my sweet one. Let’s go find that bakery.”
CHAPTER 8
In Which the Aid of a Good Doctor Is Sought
K
eep your mouth shut and your eyes open,” said Douglas, casting a critical eye over his accomplice. The soup-bowl haircut was good, a little lopsided—Snipe refused to sit still beneath the shears—but seemed all the more convincing for that. And Snipe’s sullen demeanour seemed especially well-suited for the portrayal of a grudging medieval lackey.
“I’m giving you a knife, and I want you to keep it hidden, right?” He slapped the youth on the cheek to centre his attention. “Look me in the eye and listen—the knife is only to be used in extreme emergency. I do not want a repeat of last time, hear?”
The lad ran his thumb along the blade, drawing a bead of blood, which he licked off.
“Yes, it’s sharp enough,” Douglas continued. “Keep it out of sight. I do not expect trouble, but you never know.”
He released his servant to finish preparing for the leap and turned to his own disguise. He pulled the coarse-woven robe over his head, adjusted it on his shoulders, and knotted the simple corded belt. His enquiries into the dress and manners of his hoped-for time and place had led him to believe that impersonating a travelling priest accompanied by a junior brother would be unlikely to raise comment or suspicion from the locals.
Douglas felt, as he always did, a rising sense of anticipation, and wondered if all the Flinders-Petrie men experienced the same sensation when thinking about their impending interdimensional expeditions; certainly his father and grandfather had intimated as much. For him it was like the turning of a tide, a feeling that events were no longer stagnant but beginning to move in a single, inexorable direction towards an inevitable destination, a surge that in this particular instance would carry him to a long-forgotten time and place: Oxford in the year 1260. If he had marked the positions along the ley correctly on previous fact-finding trips, he reckoned they had a decent chance of fetching up a month or two either side of October when the university would be active and the object of their quest easiest to locate.
This journey was the most ambitious he had made to date, necessitating a lengthy and elaborate research process including, among other things, the rental of a town house on Holywell Street to serve as a staging area while he studied, prepared Snipe, and gathered the sundry materials they would need for their assault on early medieval academia.
He had hired theatrical seamstresses and outfitters to provide him and his assistant with the necessary costumes; he told them he was auditioning for a performance of one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays—
Cymbeline
—and wanted sturdy, serviceable clothing that not only looked authentic but could stand up to hard wear, as he anticipated many performances. He also demanded hidden pockets concealed in the voluminous sleeves and ample hem of the garments. He engaged a medievalist from King’s College, London, for a series of private coaching sessions to perfect the forms of address and chief customs of the day. Diligent practice and unstinting repetition had led to a flirting familiarity if not a complete mastery of the conventions of that far-off time—at least, so far as could be determined with any accuracy at a remove of six hundred years or so.
The clothes and manners were the easy parts; an outward appearance could always be made to correspond, however roughly, to an acceptable norm and modified as necessary. Communication, however, would be much more difficult in that it unerringly revealed the thought processes of the individual and the society of which any man is part, and these change over time. A nineteenth-century businessman does not think or speak like a seventeenth-century farmer, much less like a thirteenth-century priest. Thus, communicating with a living person from a distant era would be most taxing. To that end, Douglas had spent three years steeped in the study of early medieval Latin.
Happily, experts in that arcane subject were thick on the ground in the university just now, and he had no difficulty pursuing the rigours of the language as far as his own considerable intellect could carry him.
He had also taken great care to assemble an unassailable cover story to explain any glaring discrepancies or oversights on his part—mistakes in his preparations which could not be foreseen, but were sure to crop up—and in this he schooled himself and Snipe until both could recite it in their sleep: they were visiting monks from Clonfert in Eire, and had come to Oxford to consult with scholars regarding some of the finer points of various doctrinal issues such as transubstantiation and angelic hierarchy. Such rustic monks, while steeped in learning, eschewed the ways of the world and were, on the whole, ignorant of current fashions and opinions, maintaining, as they did, lives of semiseclusion and freedom from financial necessity.
On the other side of the equation, Douglas placed much hope in the assumption that the average Englishman of the early medieval period was sufficiently uninformed of the world beyond the shores of England that any anomalies, discrepancies, or irregularities perceived in either himself or Snipe would simply be accounted to the fact that they were strangers in a strange land.
Snipe, of course, was the weak link in the close-forged chain Douglas had so painstakingly constructed; the young man could not read or write simple English, let alone Latin, and it was always an open question whether the youth fully comprehended even the most basic points of human interaction, or whether he just did not care to accommodate any manner of civilised discourse. This was the reality of working with Snipe, and Douglas had taken it fully into account. Accordingly, he proceeded on the premise that if anyone should happen to overhear them speaking to one another, the eavesdropper would simply conclude he was hearing some dialect of thirteenth-century Irish, and not modern English. Should the need arise, Douglas stood ready to assist this false impression in sundry ways.
As for the various creature comforts, he had provided himself with a small personal cache of silver and gold—cast in tiny ingots or sticks as described in old manuscripts—which he kept in a kidskin bag in the satchel. But, as common priests were not expected to carry much in the way of worldly wealth, he would keep that out of sight and resort to it only as needed. For most things, he would depend on the kindness of strangers and the largesse of Mother Church.
The last, but by no means least, item to be secured was the location of the ley that they would employ to make the leap into medieval Oxford. Initially this had posed an intractable difficulty. Try as he might, Douglas could not find any reference to a ley that had Oxford as its destination, or even south-central England in the early Middle Ages. None of his father’s papers or books, none of the usual sources upon which he relied, had so much as a mention of where such a ley might be found.
To be sure, he did possess that portion of the Skin Map he had liberated from Sir Henry’s trunk in the Christ Church crypt. This was, at present, virtually worthless to him because the map was in his great-grandfather’s peculiar code, which he could not read: the very reason he aspired to 1260 in the first place.
Douglas had begun to suspect the problem was insoluble when he remembered Alfred Watkins’ book,
The Old Straight Track
. In the pages of that book he found not only a reference to an Oxford ley but a simple hand-drawn map of it as well. Ordinarily he would not have looked twice at this. For, after all, ley lines always led to other places and times . . . did they not? The idea that there could be a ley in a certain place linking that same place to its other-dimensional counterpart had never occurred to him.
Could there be self-connecting leys?
He did not know. Yet it was a very simple theory to test. All he had to do was find the Oxford ley and try it. And this he did.
One morning before dawn—and before the traffic virtually consumed the road—Douglas, armed with a diagram he had copied from Watkins’ book, walked out onto the High Street. A few false tries, a lot of pacing, retracing, and sidestepping, but he eventually sensed the tingle on his skin that told him he had located a ley. After another attempt or two, he achieved a successful crossing—a fact not completely realised until he reached the crossroads and saw torches burning outside Saint Martin’s church.
Douglas hurried to the crossroads he knew as Carfax and paused to search for any clue that might establish the date of this particular iteration of Oxford. The buildings were mostly the same ones he recognised, but of more recent age; the streets were not paved with tarmac, but with cobblestones; heaps of dung mouldered at the street corner. There was no one else around, so he could not derive a guess from clothing. He might have been able to delve a little deeper into this mystery, but the sun was just rising and he knew that he must either depart again at once or spend at least one day and maybe more in this place. He was not prepared for that, so he ran back to the ley and made the jump back to the home world—albeit, three days later by the calendar.