The Bone House

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  Egged on, she overcame her innate reluctance, and the two young women went along together. And while it did seem that half the town turned out to help celebrate this illustrious citizen’s birthday, someone did notice that she was there: only a few minutes after slipping into a garden festooned with Chinese lanterns and red silk bunting, the pretty young women attracted the intense interest of His Lordship’s son.

  A glass of wine in his hand and a knowing smirk on his well-featured face, he stared at the two young ladies with the predatory gaze of a lean and hungry wolf, and then, downing his wine in a gulp, tossed aside the glass and strode to where they stood half-hidden inside a rose trellis. “How is it,” he began, looking directly at Gem, “that I know everyone here, but I don’t know you?”

  “Oh, Vernon! I didn’t see you sneaking up on us,” gasped her friend.

  “Nonsense, Juliana,” replied the heir apparent, never taking his eyes off the strange interloper. “Now tell me, who is this ravishing creature?”

  “This is my dearest friend, Gemma Burley,” said Juliana, somewhat taken aback by the young man’s interest in her friend. “She’s come up from London for a few weeks, visiting. I asked her to join me, as I didn’t want to come alone. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, but I’m afraid I do mind—terribly,” he protested. “It is a very grave infraction of the fearfully strict Ashmolean Code of Social Conduct, my dears. You simply cannot come barging into one of Lord Ashmole’s festive celebrations unbidden. There are dire consequences, you see.”

  Juliana laughed. “Pay him no mind, Gem,” she said, putting her flame-red head near Gemma’s own dark curls. “He’s joking.”

  “I never joke about such things,” he insisted. “There are penalties.”

  “What, pray tell, are the penalties,” laughed Juliana with forced gaiety, “for such a grave social infraction?”

  Gemma smiled nervously, uncertain how to take this bold fellow. Whatever else he was, Juliana was right: Vernon Ashmole was a most handsome young man.

  “You must dance every dance with me,” said Vernon with a wink. “A punishment all out of proportion to the crime, but there you are.” Reaching for Gemma’s hand, he coaxed her from the flimsy shelter of the arbour and out onto the lawn where tables had been set up with food and drink, and a wooden floor had been laid over the grass. A string ensemble was playing a Strauss waltz, and Gemma was pulled into the gracefully spinning wheel of dancers.

  The rest of the night passed in a giddy whirl of music, wine, and laughter. Vernon proved an engaging and attentive companion, and before the long summer evening was over, Gemma Burley was well and truly smitten. The blossoming love affair was too much for Juliana, who ended their friendship that very night. Even so, four years later, Gemma’s most cherished memory was of that one magical evening when His Lordship’s son had danced with only her.

  The second time she had been inside the door of Kettering House she preferred not to think about. It was after she had been driven from the family home by her father, who could not face the ignominy of an unmarried pregnant daughter. Vernon had brought her home to announce their matrimonial intentions to his own father. The resulting scene was so harrowing Gemma refused to dwell on it—relegating the unhappy memory to the outer darkness, along with the regret, recrimination, and disappointment of the last four years.

  But now, this day, a new future lay before them. The misery and unhappiness of their plight was over. When Vernon saw them standing there on his doorstep he would instantly realise the difficulty his tardiness had caused; he would embrace them and welcome them into his home—their home—and they would assume their rightful place in his affections. For there was no question that Vernon loved her. There had never been any question of that—she had letters, bundles of letters, to prove it: letters in which he vowed his undying adoration and devotion to her. She had other letters he had written promising that they would be married as soon as it became possible; and whenever he came to London on business, Vernon made time to visit her—at first in the Magdalene Home, and then at the flat he rented for them in Bethnal Green. He sent them money too.

  They would have been married long since, but for the angry objection of Vernon’s father, the old Lord Archibald Ashmole, who took violent exception to what he considered his wastrel son’s illicit dalliance and threatened to disinherit Vernon if he so much as looked at Gemma again. Nothing would do for the old lord but that his son should marry a woman from an aristocratic northern tribe—especially one whose family held extensive industrial assets in mining, say, or shipping—definitely not some southern slattern from the wrong side of the Thames. Needless to say, the old lord knew nothing about the letters, the visits, or the flat.

  And then, against any such expectation, the elder Ashmole had dropped dead—hustled off the world’s stage by a virulent case of the Spanish influenza that had scourged the nation last year. It had taken a few months for the dust to settle, but Vernon had come into his full inheritance and was now firmly installed as Lord Ashmole, taking his place in the family pantheon of patriarchs. Moreover, he was free to marry as he wished. There was nothing now to prevent Gemma and her son—their son—from joining him at last and becoming the family they were always meant to be.

  She had waited, thinking any day that he would come for them. A month went by, and then another. The money stopped. Gemma wrote letters. They were unanswered. Two more months passed and finally, at the end of her resources, she had decided to come to him.

  Stepping boldly to the door, she passed a motherly eye over the small boy beside her, licked her thumb and rubbed a smudge from his little chin. “There, that’s better. Stand up straight and tall. Be a big boy now,” she told him. Then, her hand shaking, Gemma took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  She waited a moment and knocked again. There came a click from the other side, and the great mahogany door swung open. A servant in a black coat gazed imperiously at them. “Yes?” he said, his manner implying the opposite.

  “If you please, Melton,” she said. “It’s me, Gemma Burley. I’ve come to see Vernon.”

  “Forgive me, madam,” intoned the servant. “I did not recognise you.” He opened the door to allow them entry. “If you don’t mind waiting here,” he said, “I will see if His Lordship is receiving.”

  “We’re expected,” Gemma declared.

  “Of course, madam.”

  The two were left to stand in the vestibule. “Was that my papa?” asked the boy when the servant had gone.

  “No, my sweet, that was one of your father’s servants. He has many servants. You’ll have to learn all their names, I expect.”

  “I’m tired,” said the boy. “I want to sit down.”

  “Not just yet,” said his mother. “In a little bit, we’ll all sit down together. Won’t that be fine?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “We’ll have something good to eat very, very soon. I promise.”

  They waited, the little boy fidgeting until they heard the sound of quick footsteps approaching. “Here he comes, Archie. Smile and shake hands as I showed you.”

  “Gemma!” Vernon cried, almost bounding towards them. “What in heaven’s name are you doing here?”

  “Hello, Vernon,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady as relief coursed through her like a rare tonic. They had surprised him, to be sure. He was still in his silk dressing gown with his shirt collar open. “I wrote to tell you we were coming. Didn’t you get my letter?”

  “No, my dear. I received no such communication.”

  She studied his face and did not like what she saw there. “Aren’t you glad to see us?”

  “Us?” he said distractedly.

  “Archie and me,” she told him. “We simply could not wait any longer.”

  The dark-haired handsome man glanced down at the small round face peeking out from behind his mother’s skirts.

  “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.”

  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 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.