she wasn’t about to tell Dr. Ahrens that because she might tell Mr. Dunworthy, who had been acting horrified ever since he found out she was going.
I told him two years ago I wanted to go, Kivrin thought. Two years ago, and when she’d gone to show him her costume yesterday, he was still trying to talk her out of it.
“I don’t like the way Mediaeval’s running this drop,” he’d said. “And even if they were taking the proper precautions, a young woman has no business going to the Middle Ages alone.”
“It’s all worked out,” she’d told him. “I’m Isabel de Beauvrier, daughter of Gilbert de Beauvrier, a nobleman who lived in the East Riding from 1276 to 1332.”
“And what was the daughter of a Yorkshire nobleman doing on the Oxford-Bath road alone?”
“I wasn’t. I was with all my servants, traveling to Evesham to fetch my brother, who’s lying ill in the monastery there, and we were set upon by robbers.”
“By robbers,” he said, blinking at her through his spectacles.
“I got the idea from you. You said young women didn’t travel anywhere alone in the Middle Ages, that they were always attended. So I was attended, but my servants bolted when we were attacked, and the robbers took the horses and all my goods. Mr. Gilchrist thinks it’s a plausible story. He said the probability of—”
“It’s a plausible story because the Middle Ages were full of cutthroats and thieves.”
“I know,” she said impatiently, “and disease carriers and marauding knights and other dangerous types. Weren’t there any nice people in the Middle Ages?”
“They were all busy burning witches at the stake.”
She had decided she’d better change the subject. “I came to show you my costume,” she’d said, turning slowly so he could see her blue kirtle and white fur-lined cloak. “My hair will be down for the drop.”
“You have no business wearing white to the Middle Ages,” he’d said. “It will only get dirty.”
He hadn’t been any better this morning. He had paced the narrow observation area like an expectant father. She had worried the whole morning that he would suddenly try to call a halt to the whole proceeding.
There had been delays and more delays. Mr. Gilchrist had had to tell her all over again how the corder worked, as if she were a first-year student. Not one of them had any faith in her, except possibly Badri, and even he had been maddeningly careful, measuring and remeasuring the net area and once erasing an entire series of coordinates and entering it again.
She had thought the time would never come for her to get into position, and after she had, it was even worse, lying there with her eyes closed, wondering what was going on. Latimer told Gilchrist he was worried about the spelling of Isabel they had chosen, as if anyone back then had known how to read, let alone spell. Montoya came and stood over her and told her the way to identify Skendgate was by its church’s frescoes of the Last Judgment, something she had told Kivrin at least a dozen times before.
Someone, she thought Badri because he was the only one who didn’t have any instructions for her, bent and moved her arm a little in toward her body and tugged at the skirt of her kirtle. The floor was hard, and something was digging into her side just below her ribs. Mr. Gilchrist said something, and the bell started up again.
Please, Kivrin thought, please, wondering if Dr. Ahrens had suddenly decided Kivrin needed another inoculation or if Dunworthy had raced off to the History Faculty and gotten them to change the rating back to a ten.
Whoever it was must be holding the door open—she could still hear the bell, though she couldn’t make out the tune. It wasn’t a tune. It was a slow, steady tolling that paused and then went on, and Kivrin thought, I’m through.
She was lying on her left side, her legs sprawled awkwardly as if she had been knocked down by the men who had robbed her, and her arm half-flung over her face to ward off the blow that had sent the blood trickling down the side of her face. The position of her arm should make it possible for her to open her eyes without being seen, but she didn’t open them yet. She lay still, trying to listen.
Except for the bell, there was no sound at all. If she were lying on a fourteenth-century roadside, there should be