Shades of Red

by K. C. Dyer

  “So — you weren’t in Switzerland after all?”

  “I believe I made a little side-trip there near the beginning of the term. Let’s just say it is a convenient spot from which to make a telephone call.”

  Darrell leaned against the rocky wall. “I was so angry that you weren’t watching out for Conrad, but you had your eye on him all the time.”

  “I have many students to care about, my dear, including yourself.”

  Darrell ducked her head away from the piercing intelligence that shone from her principal’s green eyes. “Thank you for coming to help me,” she said quietly, head bowed.

  “I didn’t give you any help, Darrell. You found the answers you sought all by yourself. It just struck me that you might like a little company on your journey home.” Professor Tooth consulted her wristwatch. “And now, I believe it is time we made our way up to the library. I have sent word for a small meeting of sorts, and it is due to begin very shortly.”

  Delaney wiggled his way past Darrell on the tightly winding steps and padded up alongside Professor Tooth.

  Darrell could hear the teacher’s quiet voice echoing down the stairwell. “Lovely to see you again, Delaney. Lovely to be back, in fact. I have so missed this place.”

  The secret door into the library was still slightly ajar, and as Darrell walked through she collected the book she had used as a prop to return to the shelves.

  Professor Tooth reached out a hand. “May I?”

  Darrell handed the book to the principal and glanced at the cover herself for the first time. “The Six Wives of Henry VIII,” read Professor Tooth. “An apt choice, my dear.”

  The door to the library burst open, and Kate came charging into the room, followed closely by Paris and Brodie. Her mouth dropped open at the sight of the school principal.

  “Miss Clancy! My goodness, that is no way to make your way through the halls of Eagle ...” Mrs. Follett stopped chastising Kate mid-stream as she spotted the school principal from where she stood near the door. “Why Professor Tooth! Where did you come from? And when did you arrive back from Europe? Oh my, I just feel terrible to not have been at the front door to meet your taxi. Such a long drive from the airport, too! I do believe —”

  “Not to worry, Mrs. Follett,” Professor Tooth interrupted smoothly. “It was far too early an hour for me to expect anyone to meet me. And I am afraid it is my fault these students are careening through the school. I had just sent a very urgent message for them to join me here in the library.”

  “Oh my goodness, Professor, I do hope everything is all right?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Follett, everything is just fine. I am quite delighted to be back at school, I must say, though the term is nearly over and I seem to have missed a great number of goings-on.”

  “Indeed you have, Professor Tooth. Why just the other day —”

  “Mrs. Follett, I’m terribly sorry to cut you off, but would you mind dreadfully if I ask you to gather together all the papers that require my signature? I am sure there are several important issues that cry out for my immediate attention. I will meet you down in my office very shortly.”

  “Of course, Professor.” Mrs. Follett scurried away, her head filled with happy visions of papers filed carefully away. The school principal turned once more to her students.

  She smiled warmly at the group, all of whom looked more than a little shell-shocked by the latest turn of events.

  “Perhaps we might sit a moment?” she asked politely. As the students pulled chairs around the small table near the back of the library, Professor Tooth smiled again. “I have much that demands my attention downstairs, as I am sure you know,” she said, “but I feel somehow that you may have a question or two that I might be able to address briefly.”

  While the others stared at one another in stunned silence, Darrell laughed.

  “A question or two?” she said. “Try a thousand. I don’t even know where to begin. Professor Tooth, I have been wanting to talk to you since the first day of the term.”

  “Since I do not have time to answer a thousand questions, perhaps you might begin with one you had on that first day of school,” replied the principal.

  Darrell thought for a moment. “I guess I know part of the answer now,” she said slowly, “but when school started I was really angry. I was angry at myself for somehow allowing Conrad to travel through time with us. I felt responsible for losing him — and I thought he was dead, so I felt that was my fault, too. But I was also angry with you, Professor. I mean, you’re the principal of our school, however odd a place it may be. And therefore you have ultimate responsibility. How can you call yourself the principal and not be there to take care of the students?” Darrell looked around the table at her friends. “We all know so much more than when we came to this school,” she continued. “I don’t think you’d get any argument from us that this place is the most amazing school in the world. But the risks of time travel are so enormous ... How can you let us take those risks unsupervised?”

  Professor Tooth was silent a moment, her strong fingers interlocked on the table.

  “You ask a complex and intelligent question, Darrell,” she said at last. “But the truth is that every teacher exposes his or her students to risk with each new piece of knowledge they impart. You may well ask how any teacher can let students go anywhere near a world loaded with danger that can take the form of everything from physical risk to drugs and exploitation to emotional turmoil. This is a concern teachers and parents face every day.”

  The principal got to her feet. “When I signed on as a teacher, I had to accept that there is a real world out there, and that it is my responsibility to introduce the children in my care to the information that will help them make the right choices.”

  She walked around the table and put a hand on Darrell’s shoulder. “I know you have been angry at me this term, Darrell. I regret most that you have felt deserted, because that is a feeling with which you are all too achingly familiar. And yet, I do not believe that anger is necessarily always a bad thing. Sometimes it can be a motivator, pushing people to make changes and learn more.”

  The principal looked around the table. “I believe I am correct in guessing that there is much more all of you care to learn.” Every head nodded.

  Professor Myrtle Tooth smiled. “Then perhaps you should count yourselves lucky that you enrolled at this particular school,” she said. “We specialize in learning new things, here at Eagle Glen.”

  She turned to leave. “And now I am afraid I must go address Mrs. Follett’s paperwork backlog,” she said. “You’ll be happy to know that Professor Grampian has agreed to stay on to finish the term. I’m sure Mrs. Follett has more than enough work to keep me busy until them.”

  The door closed almost silently behind the departing principal. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a two-tonne bag of feathers,” said Darrell. “Pretty soft blow, but two tonnes is two tonnes, after all.”

  “I’m just so glad you’re okay,” said Kate. “I woke up at three this morning, and when I saw your empty bed I knew right away that you’d gone into the past alone again. I’ve been so worried all morning. I guess you didn’t — you didn’t find Conrad after all.”

  Darrell stood up, relishing the support of her strong titanium leg. “Nope. I think I can safely say that Conrad is gone for good. Even a little too good, in my opinion.” She grinned and followed Professor Tooth down the front stairs.

  A warm May sun was setting into the Pacific when Darrell and her friends decided on a final walk on the beach. They wound their way down the twisting path to the shore, Delaney thundering ahead in the lead.

  “What a day,” said Brodie, taking a deep breath of salt air.

  “What a year,” said Kate. She nudged Darrell, who was trailing slightly behind the others. “There’s so much I just don’t understand yet. Why were the Jewish people persecuted during the Inquisition?”

  “Jewish people have been persecuted for centuries,
” said Darrell. “The Inquisition everywhere in Europe was a terrible thing. The only good thing was that because of it, changes took place. People like Martin Luther rose up against the wrongs that the church perpetuated, and elsewhere the common people ended up fighting the rule of absolute monarchs.” She sighed. “I wish I knew the whole story. I feel so sick about Anne. She’d only been married three years and she was mother to one of the greatest queens England ever had. And when Henry got tired of her, he had her head chopped off just because it suited him.”

  “I read that when they buried her the box was too small so they had to tuck her head in beside the body,” said Kate. “That man must have been a monster.”

  “I don’t think he really was a monster,” said Darrell. “He was a man brought up to believe that he was answerable to no one but God — and even then he fought to become leader of the church in England. His word was the law.”

  “I think he was a monster,” said Kate firmly. “He divorced or killed five wives and died on the sixth, and all to satisfy his need for a son to rule after he was gone.” She raised an eyebrow. “From what I’ve read, his daughter Elizabeth did as good a job as any man.”

  “And she had red hair,” teased Paris.

  “He changed religion in England forever,” said Darrell. “Monster or not — the world is not the same place it was before he was in it.” She kicked a pebble along the sand. “I’d also like to know what happened to Lady Jacqueline. Did she escape through Traitor’s Gate and make it back to her family?”

  “There’s so much we’ll never know,” said Kate with a sigh. “You were there the most, Darrell. Do you think the Catholic Church was doing the right thing?”

  “They thought so.”

  “And what about the Moors? The Christians wanted to fight the Moors because they were Muslim, right?”

  Darrell nodded. “That was a large part of it. It’s weird, you know. We got a chance to go back and see these massive changes right as they were taking place. The Inquisition changed the world forever, and the Protestant Reformation did too. But for all the torture and pain and loss — I feel like we haven’t really learned our lesson, y’know?”

  “No — I don’t know,” argued Paris. “I thought travelling through time was amazing. It was about fun — not about learning lessons.”

  Darrell laughed. “I meant we as a people — the human race. All the agony that went into changing the church and the way people are ruled, and five hundred years later my mom is still having to work for an organization that goes to wartorn countries to help promote peace. We never seem to know the whole story.”

  Kate stopped and put her hand against one of the giant boulders, sun baked and warm. “What is the whole story?” she whispered.

  Brodie leaned against the boulder and smiled. “Darrell’s right. It was all those things — and more. But how many people do you know that got to see a part of it for themselves?”

  He turned to Darrell. “How was your mom’s trip? Is she coming to get you tomorrow?”

  Darrell nodded and gave a little sigh. “She’s great — better than great, she tells me. I guess while I was facing off with the Duke of Norfolk, she was having a crisis of her own. A bomb went off in a bus outside her hospital. Oh, she was okay,” Darrell said quickly, seeing her friends’ horrified faces. “David was there to help her get back into the hospital, and she ended up saving a number of the casualties.”

  Darrell reached down and stroked Delaney’s warm fur.

  “I get the feeling she’s going to marry the guy,” she said quietly. “And I guess that’s okay. He’s been pretty good at helping her stay safe, and maybe she needs somebody more than just me to look after, too.”

  “Well,” said Paris, turning his face to the setting sun and stretching like a cat, “I for one have had enough of living in the past for now. I’m ready to spend some time water-skiing this summer.”

  As Kate and Brodie weighed in on the relative merits of assorted water sports, Darrell and Delaney walked to the narrow mouth of the cave. I’ve had enough of living in the past, too, she thought. My own past, anyway.

  She felt the thump of Delaney’s gently waving tail as she looked up the cliff, past the old arbutus to where the windows of Eagle Glen shone with an impossible brilliance in the setting sun.

  “Besides, Delaney-boy,” she said, her hand brushing the thick ruff of his fur, “I think there might be a little exploring still to do around Eagle Glen, don’t you?”