by Jodi Taylor
The Chronicles of St Mary’s
JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER
A SYMPHONY OF ECHOES
A SECOND CHANCE
A TRAIL THROUGH TIME
NO TIME LIKE THE PAST
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND HISTORY
AND THE REST IS HISTORY
The Chronicles of St Mary’s Short Stories
WHEN A CHILD IS BORN
ROMAN HOLIDAY
CHRISTMAS PRESENT
SHIPS, STINGS, AND WEDDING RINGS
THE GREAT ST MARY’S DAY OUT
MY NAME IS MARKHAM
THE VERY FIRST DAMNED THING
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT – A ST MARY’S COLLECTION
Also by Jodi Taylor
THE NOTHING GIRL
LITTLE DONKEY
THE SOMETHING GIRL
A BACHELOR ESTABLISHMENT (AS ISABELLA BARCLAY)
Dramatis Thingummy
Matthew Edward Farrell
A very small but very important human.
Dr Maxwell
Chief Operations Officer.
Not having a good year. Not having a good year at all.
Leon Farrell
Chief Technical Officer.
Racing up and down the timeline.
Again. Can he save the day? Again?
Tim Peterson
Not in a good place.
Mr Markham
Unexpectedly in charge of the Security Section.
Dr Bairstow
Director of St Mary’s.
Holding them all together.
Mrs Partridge
PA to Dr Bairstow and Muse of History.
History Department
Mr Clerk
Senior Historian.
Miss Prentiss
Senior Historian.
Mr Atherton
Mr Bashford
Miss North
Miss Sykes
Normal historians – where the wordnormal has a different meaning fromin the real world.
Miss Grey
Very unenthusiastic historian.
Technical Section
Mr Dieter
Second Chief Technical Officer.
Mr Lindstrom
Technical Officer.
Terrified of women. He’s not going to fare well at St Mary’s, is he?
Medical Section
Dr Helen Foster
Chief Medical Officer.
Will now never be without a packet of cigarettes.
Nurse Fortunata
Junior Nurse.
Nurse Hunter
If she is married to Markham then not surprisingly she’s keeping very quiet about it.
Dr Nathaniel Stone
Can’t quite believe what’s going on around him. Possesses a degree in advanced deviousness.Cocoa drinker.
Research and Development
Professor Rapson
Head of R&D
One of the tossers.
Miss Lingoss
Multi-coloured member of R&D.
The other tosser.
Dr Dowson
Librarian and Archivist.
Surprisingly subdued this time around.
Others
Mrs Mack
Kitchen Supremo, former urban guerrilla and maker of extremely good cakes.
Mrs Enderby
Head of Wardrobe.
Unexpectedly good with a croquet mallet.
Miss Lee
Supposedly Max’s PA.
Not yet up to speed with telephone answering techniques.
The Time Police
(Managing to be both the baddies and the goodies depending at which point in the story you are.)
Marietta Hay
Commander of Time Police.
Captain Charlie Farenden
Her adjutant.
Captain Matthew Ellis
A familiar face.
A doctor
With his hands full.
Officers Trent and Parrish
Pizza bringers.
Officer Van Owen
An old friend.
Sundry Time Police Officers
Whose main purpose seems to be to stand around in corridors fighting with Max.
Adrian and Mikey
Time Travellers from the future and proud teapot builders.
Slowly dying of radiation sickness.
Turk
An alleged horse. Possesses strong opinions concerning personal space.
Lisa Dottle
Not anywhere near as wet as she used to be. Only slightly damp these days and getting drier all the time.Fancies Peterson.
Colin
A dead dog currently residing on top of Max’s wardrobe.
Rushfordshire Stinking Henry
A rather large piece of radioactive cheese.
Clive Ronan
Yep. He’s back again.
Historical Figures
Harold Godwinson
Earl of Wessex and later King of England.
Duke William of Normandy
The Bastard.
Count Guy of Ponthieu
Proud possessor of Harold Godwinson and determined to cash in.
Odo of Conteville
Battling Bishop of Bayeux.
King Harald Hardrada
Earns his seven feet of English soil.
Tostig of Northumberland
An opportunist.
Eystein Orri
Unsuccessfully bringing reinforcements.
Giant Viking
Holding the bridge.
Edith Swanneschals
King Harold’s mistress and body snatcher.
Plus a cast of thousands…
The Lost Army of Cambyses
All fifty thousand of them.
The citizens of Beaurain
All of them probably suffering from some dreadful lung disease.
The citizens of Bayeux
All under their bishop’s watchful eye.
The Viking army of Harald and Tostig
Meeting their end at Stamford Bridge. Not the boring football ground! The other one.
The Saxon Fyrd
Making its final appearance. Never to be seen again.
The Norman Army
Including mercenaries, adventurers and anyone else looking to make a quick buck.
The citizens of Constantinople
Not having a good day.
Crusaders
On their way to the Holy Land and inexplicably stopping off in Constantinople. Pillage and plunder almost certainly have something to do with it.
Prologue
I was back at St Mary’s. I was safe. My baby, Matthew, was safe. Leon was safe. Statements I’d once never thought I’d be able to make. These days, the three of us were a contented family unit. I loved Matthew. Matthew loved me. And Leon loved both of us.
Despite his dramatic entry into this world, Matthew was a happy, friendly, normal little baby, who would gurgle contentedly as he was passed from person to person and spoiled rotten, but mostly – he was mine. I was the one to whom he held out his arms first. He always held out his arms to me. I could hardly believe it. Leon laughed and called him ‘Mummy’s Boy’, but the two of us had a special relationship. For me, it was a time of quiet happiness, because none of this was something I ever thought would happen to me.
True, Leon and I were still at St Mary’s. After Clive Ronan’s attempt to kidnap me, Dr Bairstow had requested that, for our own protection, we remain at St Mary’s, and so we had. We had a suite of rooms up under the roof in the main part of the building, which, as Peterson said, were along so many narrow corridors and up so many crooked stairways, that any passing homicidal psychopath wou
ld never be able to find us.
He was a happy bunny these days, as well. No one knew what methods he’d used to persuade Dr Foster to marry him, but whatever he’d done had worked. He was regarded around the building with equal amounts of awe, admiration, respect and sympathy.
‘About bloody time,’ I’d said, grinning at him, and Markham had made a rude noise, which was a mistake on his part because attention immediately shifted his way.
‘So what about you?’ demanded Peterson, moving his chair slightly so Markham couldn’t escape.
‘What about me?’ he said, innocence oozing from every pore.
‘Are you married?’
‘Me?’ he said in astonishment.
‘Yes, you.’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘You did.’
‘Did I? When?’
A few days after Matthew’s somewhat unconventional entry into the world, Markham had let slip he was married. To Hunter. They’d been married for years he’d said, and then nipped out of the door while we were too gobsmacked to stop him. Peterson and I had been attempting to get to the bottom of this ever since, but as teachers, employers, policemen, magistrates, army officers and Dr Bairstow had discovered, Markham can be a slippery little sod when it comes to prising information out of him. He was being one now, grinning at us over his mug of tea. We’d tried every possible approach and were still none the wiser, and neither of us had the nerve to approach Nurse Hunter, the terror of St Mary’s.
We all work at St Mary’s. Or, to give it the correct title, the Institute of Historical Research at St Mary’s Priory. Our job is to investigate major historical events in contemporary time. It’s not time travel because, as Dr Bairstow never fails to point out, we are not living in the pages of a sci-fi/fantasy novel, and no one argues with him, because our lives are hazardous enough without deliberately asking for trouble. So we never mention time travel. Although that’s what we do.
We’re located just outside Rushford at the end of a country lane that goes nowhere, because the Government thought we couldn’t do much damage in this remote corner of a quiet county. That assumption was about as correct as government assumptions usually are. Surely the law of averages dictates that one day they must get at least one right.
Anyway, my name is Maxwell. I’m Chief Operations Officer and returning from maternity leave to a crowded schedule. We had a lot on these days. There were important anniversaries coming up and Thirsk University, our nominal employers, had commissioned an in-depth study of the events culminating in the Battle of Hastings. We were to witness the aftermath of Harold Godwinson’s shipwreck – the one that placed him in the power of William of Normandy, followed by that critically important oath-taking ceremony at Bayeux. Then on to Stamford Bridge – that’s the battle, not the much less interesting football ground – when Harold defeated the forces of Tostig and Harold Hardrada and then, nineteen days later, the struggle at Hastings itself and the end of Saxon life in England. If time and finances permitted, there would be a jump to William’s coronation on Christmas Day, 1066. Something which I wouldn’t be able to attend. We’d had a go at that jump a couple of years ago, allowed ourselves to be distracted and missed it.
The last few months at St Mary’s hadn’t been without incident, either. Only a few months ago, to worldwide excitement, the Sword of Tristram and a crown from the Holy Roman Empire had been discovered in our woods. I was on maternity leave but I wandered up a couple of times, parked baby Matthew under a tree and helped out. The sword and crown were exactly where we’d left them although, as Peterson said at the subsequent piss-up, they were hardly likely to get up and move, were they? There wasn’t much of the sword left – only the pommel and a sliver of metal with a fragment of that all-important verse remaining. The rest was just a dark shape in the soil, but the crown, being mostly of gold, had fared much better.
Dr Chalfont, who had headed the dig, had been reinstated as Chancellor of Thirsk University just in time for them to take credit for the find. Which had been the whole point of us burying the stuff for her in the first place. She had returned to Thirsk in triumph and, according to rumour, the Night of the Long Knives had been nothing in comparison. The panelled corridors of the stately and venerable University of Thirsk had run red with academic blood. Metaphorically speaking. It had been, said the Chancellor, the light of battle still in her eye, an invigorating experience and an excellent opportunity for a great deal of dead wood removal, but she would be grateful if we would we never put her in such a position again. We had nodded and promised.
So here we all were and everything was fine.
I was a member of a happy family – somewhat to my surprise.
Peterson was training to be Dr Bairstow’s deputy.
Markham had been reinstated as Major Guthrie’s number two. And yes, all the bad jokes had been made.
St Mary’s was relatively stable and solvent.
Everything was absolutely fine.
It began as a day just like any other. I awoke to a crisp, frosty morning and decided to go for a run. You can’t use giving birth as an excuse forever. I’ve never been what you might call toned, but even I could see it was time to get into some sort of shape. Yes, I’d been on maternity leave, but I wanted to hit the ground running, so to speak, and therefore a little time spent running now might mean a lot less time hitting the ground later on.
I left Leon and Matthew in the bath, playing Attack of the Deadly Flannels. I’m not sure what the game entails, but there’s always a lot of splashing and shrieking – and that’s just Leon. Followed by massive mopping up afterwards, of course.
I blew them both a kiss, ignored Leon’s invitation to join them, and shot off to pick up a bottle of water, bumping into Miss Dottle on the stairs.
Dottle wasn’t actually a member of St Mary’s. She and her boss, the idiot Halcombe, were from Thirsk University, and had been foisted on us last year. That had been my fault – we did something really bad, but no one talks about it so neither will I. Anyway, he’d tried to sabotage an assignment and Dr Foster had diagnosed him with leprosy – as you do – which had got rid of him nicely, leaving us with the much more likeable Miss Dottle.
‘Sorry,’ I said, as she bounced off the banisters.
‘That’s quite all right.’ She peered at me.
‘Off for a run,’ I said. ‘Need to get back into shape before taking on the 1066 assignments. A couple of times around the lake should do it.’
As always, she looked over my shoulder for Peterson. She’s a quiet girl and, even though she’s Thirsk’s representative here at St Mary’s, people do quite like her. Besides, as Peterson pointed out, we’d sent them Kalinda Black – or that six-foot blonde psychopath, as Leon always refers to her – so they had rather got the worst of the deal. Miss Dottle was actually quite sweet. True, she had an enormous crush on Peterson, blushing like a sunset whenever he appeared over the horizon but, let’s face it, if you’re going to have a crush on anyone, you could do worse than Peterson. A lot worse.
It could be Markham, for instance, who was the next person to get between me and fresh air.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded.
‘Honestly, I get kidnapped just once…’
‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been tasked by Dr B to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
‘You’ve been what?’
‘Well, actually, he said, “Mr Markham, should anything happen to Dr Maxwell, I will hold you personally responsible and the consequences will be commensurate with my displeasure.”‘
I winced. ‘Ouch.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So, to repeat myself – where are you off to?’
‘A couple of times around the lake,’ I said, patting my midriff. It rippled in a disconcerting manner.
Markham stepped back. ‘The sooner the better I’d say. Got your thingy?’
My thingy – as the Security Section refers to it, because they have
to keep things simple otherwise they can’t cope – was the personal attack alarm, hanging around my neck. For further security, they’d increased the number of my tags. In addition to the normal one in my arm, they’d inserted another in my thigh. ‘In case your arm gets chopped off,’ said Helen, comfortingly, and a third under my shoulder blade.
‘In case all your arms and legs get chopped off,’ said Markham.
It’s good to have friends.
Sighing and rolling my eyes, I presented my thingy for inspection, was instructed to wave as I passed the windows, not to overdo things, to remember my water, to try not to fall over my own feet, or get lost.
Since he showed signs of wanting to come with me, I asked him if he really was married, which always shifts him faster than one of Helen’s constipation cures goes through a short historian, and eventually I made it out into the fresh air.
Bloody hell, half the morning gone already.
I wandered over to the lake, stretched out a few non-existent muscles and set off.
I have my own formula. A hundred yard’s jog. Hundred yard’s brisk walk. Hundred yard’s sprint. Hundred yard’s jog again. It covers the ground surprisingly quickly. Although not as quickly as having a pack of enraged villagers coming at you waving pitchforks and torches and shouting about burning the witch. Then watch me really move.
