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.”
PART TWO
Auspicious Meetings
CHAPTER 8
In Which the Aid of a Good Doctor Is Sought
Keep 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