and Mary told him he could go home and took his temp and bloods so he wouldn’t have to come back. He was about to start home when they brought Sisu Fairchild in. He didn’t make it home till nearly teatime.
Colin wasn’t at the gate nor in hall, where Finch was nearly out of sugar and butter. “Where’s Dr. Ahrens’s nephew?” Dunworthy asked him.
“He waited by the gate all morning,” Finch said, anxiously counting over sugar cubes. “The post didn’t come till past one, and then he went over to his great-aunt’s flat to see if the parcels had been sent there. I gather they hadn’t. He came back looking very glum, and then about half an hour ago, he said suddenly, ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ and shot out. Perhaps he’d thought of some other place the parcels might have been sent to.”
But weren’t, Dunworthy thought. “What time do the shops close today?” he asked Finch.
“Christmas Eve? Oh, they’re already closed, sir. They always close early on Christmas Eve, and some of them closed at noon due to the lack of trade. I’ve a number of messages, sir—”
“They’ll have to wait,” Dunworthy said, snatched up his umbrella, and went out again. Finch was right. The shops were all closed. He went down to Blackwell’s, thinking they had surely stayed open, but they were shut up tight. They had already taken advantage of the selling points of the situation, though. In the window, arranged amid the snow-covered houses of the toy Victorian village, were self-help medical books, drug compendia, and a brightly colored paperback entitled Laughing Your Way to Perfect Health.
He finally found an open post office off the High, but it had only cigarettes, cheap sweets, and a rack of greeting cards, nothing in the way of suitable gifts for twelve-year-old boys. He went out without buying anything and then went back and purchased a pound’s worth of toffee, a gobstopper the size of a small asteroid, and several packets of a sweet that looked like soap tablets. It wasn’t much, but Mary had said she’d bought some other things.
The other things turned out to be a pair of gray woolen socks, even grimmer than the muffler, and a vocabulary improvement vid. There were crackers, at least, and sheets of wrapping paper, but a pair of socks and some toffee hardly made a Christmas. He looked around the study, trying to think what he had that might do.
Colin had said, “Apocalyptic!” when Dunworthy had told him Kivrin was in the Middle Ages. He pulled down The Age of Chivalry. It only had illustrations, no holos, but it was the best he could do on short notice. He wrapped it and the rest of the presents hastily, changed his clothes, and hurried over to St. Mary the Virgin’s in a downpour, ducking across the deserted courtyard of the Bodleian and trying to avoid the spilling gutters.
No one in their right mind would come out in this. Last year the weather had been dry, and the church was still only half-full. Kivrin had gone with him. She had stayed up for the vac to study, and he had found her in the Bodleian and insisted on her coming to his sherry party and then to church.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she’d said on the way to the church. “I should be doing research.”
“You can do it at St. Mary the Virgin’s. Built in 1139 and all just as it was in the Middle Ages, including the heating system.”
“The interchurch service is authentic, too, I suppose,” she’d said.
“I have no doubt that in spirit it is as well meant and as fraught with foolishness as any mediaeval mass,” he had said.
He hurried down the narrow path next to Brasenose and opened the door of St. Mary’s to a blast of hot air. His spectacles steamed up. He stopped in the narthex and wiped them on the tail of his muffler, but they clouded up again immediately.
“The vicar’s looking for you,” Colin said. He was wearing a jacket and shirt, and his hair was combed. He handed Dunworthy an order of service from a large stack he was holding.
“I thought you were going to stay at home,” Dunworthy said.
“With Mrs. Gaddson? What a necrotic idea! Even church is better than that, so I told Ms. Taylor I’d help carry the bells over.”
“And the vicar put you to work,” Dunworthy said, still trying to get his spectacles clear. “Have you had any business?”
“Are you